First post part 4

[johnsmith]

In the last post “post I part 3” I attempted to describe my thinking on the concept of Stress Breakdown Point. Graph 1 in the last post indicated that a small change in stress could make a lot of difference in quality of life for people with chronic health disability.

In 2007 the first international conference on fascia took place at Harvard Medical School. Fascia was worked on by many in the complementary field. Before 2007 their work often got dismissed by traditional medicine as placebo or anecdotal with successes rated as the patient who had been worked on would have recovered without their help anyway. The 2007 conference was a step to putting fascia work on a scientific basis with reports being written in a scientific manner.

There are now many books on Fascia. For easy reading and not too expensive I would recommend “Fascia – what it is and why it matters” by David Lesondak ISBN 978-1-909141-55-1.

The image I presented is a schematic of the data pathways to the brain and back via the spinal cord.

I have also found the following three books useful for my investigations into Fascia they are:

1. “Fascia The tensional Network of the Human Body” [ISBN: 978-0-7020-3425-1] Schleip et al articles on Fascia written by contributing authors

2. “Anatomy Trains Myofascial Meridians for manual & Movement Therapists” [ISBN: 978-0-7020-4654-4] by Thomas Myers

3. “Born to Walk Myofascial Efficiency and the body in movement” [ISBN: 978-1-58394-769-2] by James Earls

Fascia is not something that I have a feel for from hands on experience. My knowledge base is spinal reflex behaviour and muscle behaviour. The descriptions of fascia and the scientific knowledge base on fascia is an adjunct to my work with Alexander Technique, chiropractic treatment on me and T’ai Chi that I have developed conclusions on. I have to heavily on the work of others on fascia and hope that I have understood enough to build a working model on.

A working model does not have to be accurate like a scientific model. It needs to be accurate enough to draw conclusions on and predict things from working experiments.

The models given by psychiatry: talk about genetic problems solvable if we find the right drug to repair wrong signalling; talk about serotonin mismatches which need to be corrected by some chemical . What if the truth actually lies elsewhere and actually lies in the way the brain behaves as a parallel processing computer receiving inputs from the fascia and acting on the inputs from the fascia. The model given in my last post looked at what happens when stresses are above the stress breakdown point. If the stresses are above the stress breakdown point and you see a psychiatrist the psychiatrist is making a diagnosis on an engineering system whose function is unpredictable. I suggest that many of the labels that psychiatrists like to use on patients may be occurring when stresses on the engineering system are too high for the system to work effectively. The system is being diagnosed when the system is in falling apart mode. The falling apart occurring at the brain level because the inputs from the fascia are casing problematic brain overload. This is very different from the chemical theory.

Another interesting aside.

newscientist.com/article/21...

dated 25 July 2018

The article says: “...Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite carried by cats. It can infect people through contact with cat faeces, poorly cooked meat, or contaminated water, and as many as one-third of the world’s population may be infected. The parasite doesn’t make us feel sick, but it forms cysts in the brain where it can remain for the rest of a person’s life. Some studies have linked infection with the parasite to slower reaction times, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, suicidal behaviour, and explosive anger…."

One wonders has much influence this parasite affects our functioning. How much input this parasite has in causes some of the chronic issues some of us have. I ask this question because the parasite issue is never investigated by the medical profession when pain killers are issued for some of the chronic conditions that occur suddenly out of nowhere. If you have a cysts in the brain developing you have pressure developing and you have a change in nerve response developing which is different than what was there before.

The investigations into fascia have shown that the fascia has thousands of nerve endings that feed into the spine. Recent data [circa 2012] indicates that fascia in general is not just a passive structure but is contractile. The basis of the contractility is myofibroblasts that appear to be present in many fascia and perform very slow “contractions” lasting many minutes when the tissue is stimulated chemically.

Emotions are felt in the body. It is my viewpoint that fascia is what determines to a very large extent the emotions that are felt and interpreted by the brain. The brain determines the tensions in the fascia by various means and then interprets these emotions by feedbacks from the fascia to the spine and then from the spine to the brain. If the feedbacks are very high (what ever this means) then the brain starts to get overloaded and brain’s stress breakdown point is reached with the result a fall in ability to do things well. This results in a positive feedback loop. Referring to graph 1 in “post I part 3” one notices that below the stress breakdown point you need an increase in internal stress to get better performance. In the positive feedback loop where stress is above the stress breakdown point you can get a detection of lower performance. The internal stress is increased to try and get better performance. There is no feedback to realise that the stress is above the stress breakdown point and there is no realisation that increasing stress is causing decreasing performance on a very large scale. This has happened to me several times over the years after my road traffic accident. Very embarrassing and socially problematic. I had to learn a whole set of new social skills to handle my episodes of incompetence. I had to learn to predict certain stressful situations to avoid going into overload. I had to learn to put a lot more attention into monitoring myself because monitoring skills that were okay when fully healthy were not up to the job when you have a chronic condition.

The body engineering system works with conserving energy. When healthy you only need to take snapshot monitoring every hour or so. You do not need to do more than this. The feedbacks and interactions between the body’s engineering systems run in a predictable manner. When a chronic condition develops the feedbacks and interactions between the body’s engineering systems start to run in a unpredictable manner. Stresses start to be applied to the fascia that have never been applied before. The fascia informs the brain and the brain has now has to deal with signals it never has had to deal with before. The brain responds to these signals and the response may not be conducive to good health because the brain which never had to act on these signals before does not know what the best response is. A lot more monitoring is needed. You have to develop ways to do a lot more monitoring. It takes time to learn that you need to do this to prevent quality of life meltdowns and then it takes time to develop the increased monitoring and time to learn to interpret what the monitoring results mean and time to learn what to do when you get the various monitoring results.

My viewpoint on fascia and emotion is the result of my investigations into myself. However I think each person must investigate this for themselves to determine its truth and how to use it.

The evidence from investigations into myself is improvement of quality of life when you have a chronic condition lies in the way we move and how we move. This is easy to say and not so easy to do. There are other factors as well for investigation which I will discuss in another post.

I am presented theories for a working model of what may or may not be taking place. The important thing is always investigate owns self to attempt to see if it matches ones own experience.

Part 5 to follow