Chiropractic care since 2001, with a psychosocial view and a ‘seeing’ therapeutic touch.
A chiropractor Identifies with poor range of motion, not global range like a medic, but specific range of individual joints and muscles and how they fit together into global range of motion.
When your body adopts a compensation strategy the fit together of muscles and joints is imbalanced giving a neurological or functional change that can be palpated and demonstrated clinically.
Compensations can lead to joint wear rather than joint repair.
Aims
- Encourage repair rather than wear
- Facilitate muscular strength and joint stability
- Encourage self determined movement choice over pain/fear led movement avoidance
- Offer ‘Soonest Comfort’
Lee trusts how a person identifies with their body and respects how people explain their concerns.
So, Why Fascia…?
When muscles get stiff the measure of stiffness is relative to the tension of fascia surrounding muscles. As a muscle is exercised it expands pushing out against the surrounding fascia. Picked up by nerves found within fascia. Making fascia the sensory organ for muscular stiffness.
Fascia contains specialist nerves that provide muscles with their motor (go) signals, proprioception (co-ordination / strength) and force transmission feedback. When fascia is faulty, muscular spasm or weakness might result. Muscles require faulty fascia to spasm. Imbalanced musculature leads to wearing of joint cartilage making joints unstable, which abnormally loads fascia, resulting in pain signals sent to the brain.
Nerves themselves have a fascial sheath that contain them. A fascial sheath with its own nerves sensing nerve motion discrepancies sending signals downstream giving the impression of a ‘trapped’ nerve.
Stress can confuse fascia through something called autonomic tone and the amount of circulating adrenaline can cause fascia to constrict blood vessels. Stress causes us to breath differently which can impact pH levels something the myofibroblasts (muscles within fascia) are sensitive to. Causing tightness.
During an immune response such as a cold it is your fascia that causes that all over body stiffness feeling. All made possible through a molecule called TGF-B1 that looks to increase immune cells called t-cells.
Free nerve endings from fascia end in the insula of the brain informing your brain as to the overall condition of your body in pH, temperature and ion content. The insula is a part of the brain that helps one know if I am ok or not. The insula has been implicated in MSK pain syndromes.