Pain in the belly is one of those things that tends to get our
attention. Most of us have a pretty good idea when we need better care than
what Dr. Mom can offer. We head to the
doctor or the ER and hope for the best. I often tell people to do that. It’s the wisest first choice.
It's never a bad to have a birds eye view of what’s happening regarding our
health. This article is meant to add
something to that perspective. Sometimes
we need more than just a diagnosis. We
want to understand. I hope this helps!
Doctors are trained to know what collection of symptoms you have and what
physical signs point to a particular diagnosis.
They often perform tests to help refine this base idea and to make sure
that their interpretation of the initial presenting picture is accurate. This leads to more precise and specific
understanding of the root problem so that the appropriate treatment can
proceed.
In my profession I often find people have been to multiple types of practitioners and still have not figured out the problem. I’m certainly not a doctor but I do have people come in with a complaint of pain in a soft tissue. Pain in soft tissue is what I work with!
It turns out that tender regions in the stomach muscles are often located in tender regions in taut bands of muscle fibers. These are called trigger points. Gentle pressure and stretch in these areas often leads to relief that has not happened from other types of treatment.
Other professions view this phenomena differently. I view these as being complimentary rather than opposing views. The medical profession often sees and orders particular tests to look at the organs and rule them out as causes of the pain. Why do they do that?
A good starting place is the work of Sir Henry Head in the early part of the last century. Dr. Head discovered that particular regions in the front of the body became tender when there was a problem with the organ. Light pressure was painful and deep quick pressure resulted in exquisite pain. He mapped these regions and published them in a series of articles. The regions were known as “Head’s Zones” and are still used today for diagnostic purposes in Germany, France, and Spain.
During the same time period, another doctor in Pennsylvania did a series of 50 autopsies. Dr. Winsor removed the front of the torso and found the organs that had caused disease in the patients. He followed the nerves from the organ back to the spine and identified “curves” associated with the affected organ in all 50 cases. Chiropractors looked at this as evidence of support for their profession.
Even more foundational, early Chiropractors developed a practice called "Nerve Tracing." They would go to where the pain was felt and press along the course of the nerve toward the spine. This was a gig part of how they determined where to treat. It was an incredibly important ingredient that contributed the their success as a discipline! The following picture is from an early Choropractic textbook.
Not to be outdone, the medical profession utilized the work of doctor Head in a
specialty they called Spondylotherapy.
They believed that when they treated the particular region of the spine
that controlled the Head’s Zone with electrical therapy or tapping the spinal
segment with a reflex hammer, that they caused a reflex action in the organ and
the associated muscles that was therapeutic.
We don’t want to forget acupuncture. Westerners tend to view this discipline as little more than a bunch of “woo.” This is unfortunate because there is a huge overlap in the pressure points of acupuncture and the trigger points of western medicine. Not only that but the points are located near nerves. The organs associated with the point have a connection with particular nerves, and the points connected are present in embryological development. A recent acupuncture text correlates spinal regions with Head’s zones and western neurology in a very convincing manner.
I like to put that all together in my work. When someone reports pain I look for the location and determine the spinal level of the region and determine if the tissues in that region are tender. I do the same if they report a particular organ problem and try to support the medical treatment of that problem with appropriate work on the soft tissues and spinal segments associated with that problem.
Once the pain has been localized as related to a
particular region of the spine – I take note of that and then search to muscles
for trigger points, range of motion, and skin sensitivity.
This is all in preparation for determining where and how I need to work. I like
to treat the spinal region first – that calms the soft tissues and nerve
irritability considerably. It’s not
uncommon to see a significant improvement in range of motion and a decrease in
pain with this much work alone. But wait
– there’s more!
The next stage is calming down the nerve that connects the affected tissues to
their nerve supply at the spine. I
typically do this by moving the nerve in a motion that some have called
flossing. It turns out that nerves, just
like muscles, have a range of motion.
When that motion is limited they become more irritable and that makes
the muscles irritable as well. The
muscle range of motion and pain almost always improve at this point. Often – this is where the treatment can
end. But I prefer to keep going.
The soft tissues at the end of these nerves are also ways to calm town the
spinal segment and through it, according to the writings of Osteopathy,
Chiropractic, Acupuncture, and Splondylotherapy, may support the work of the
internal organs supplied by the same nerve segments.
I believe that this approach offers a coherent view of how the nervous system works and that it helps to see the connections between the spine, organs, and soft tissues in a way that makes sense. I hope it helps!
