Fascial manipulation means shifting the therapeutic gaze from the treatment of the consequence to that of the cause.
In recent decades, pain science has made it possible to understand that the site of pain often has little or nothing to do with actual tissue damage. The perception of pain is much more complex and precisely because we speak of “perception” we know that in reality it derives from a set of different stimuli whose result is the current problem.
More and more quality scientific studies inform us of the fact that physiological tissue alterations such as cracks of the menisci, protrusions and herniated discs, tendon alterations, are not necessarily linked to pain as they are often found even in examinations of completely asymptomatic people.
Given this assumption, it happens very often that the person makes an appointment and has already carried out diagnostic tests that have revealed tissue alterations; often, however, a careful examination of the type of pain, its development and behavior can make it clear that the two things have little to do with each other.
Very often it happens that there is something that has interfered with the body balance in a broad sense and has led to the appearance of pain in a site that perhaps already had long-standing tension and stiffness.
The balance of the body must be framed according to what is called the Bio-Psycho-social model:
A Bilogical part is obviously fundamental and in this we find the structures that can be altered (Disks, ligaments, tendons, etc.) and send signals to the brain about one’s state of health. These signals are stored by the brain and are combined with a whole other series of data deriving from our internal environment.
The internal environment is made up of signals deriving from vital organs (brought to the brain by the vagus nerve, by the Splanchnic nerves and by the Phrenic Nerve as well as by the ganglia of the autonomic nervous system, which includes the enteric system also called “second brain”) as well as from the signals deriving from our thoughts and emotions. The latter in turn are influenced by our internal environment, but also by what we have around us and the information we receive (far too much in recent years: we are talking about INFODEMIA).
Internal and external environment create what we can call psycho-social factor.
Fascial Manipulation tries to better understand how these 3 aspects contribute to creating pain by focusing more on the part that can best modify, that is the biological one through the treatment of the Muscular Fascia and its relationship with the Internal or Visceral one.
Those who study this method consider the band as the movement’s conductor. The fascia is, in fact, the membrane capable of coordinating all the variables involved in the motor act; however, for a long time, this role went unnoticed: the only motor of muscular action was considered to be the nervous system, an evaluation that generated in clinical practice an almost exclusive attention to the consequences, to pain understood as a disease, to be circumvented through the use of analgesic drugs. Fascial Manipulation, on the other hand, welcomes pain and exploits it to understand how to act on the cause of the dysfunction and investigates the associations between different patient pathologies, setting up a personalized global treatment that overcomes the dualism of the locomotor-internal organs and tends to bring back the whole organism to its physiological equilibrium.