Have you ever had an injury that just didn’t heal? Or maybe your first injury got better only to be replaced by another ache or pain?

In this article I’m going to use an osteopathic approach to explain this phenomenon.  A skilled therapist will look deeper and work with the root cause of the problem.

What’s the Difference Between a Symptom and a Cause?

A symptom is something that bothers you. For example, a rash is a symptom. Pain and swelling are symptoms. They let you know something is wrong but they don’t tell you much about what is wrong.

And getting rid of the symptom does not automatically get rid of the cause.

What are the Hidden Factors Behind Injury and Illness?

Hidden factors are the root causes of injury and illness that are often obscured by years of symptoms.

Here are some factors that osteopathic therapists are trained to look for:

1. Old Injuries Dating Right Back to Birth

You are shaped by everything that happens to you. You contain the history of every event you’ve experienced, no matter how long ago.

As you move through life, every incident, every injury and illness is laid down in the tissues of your body.

Imagine a slightly crooked, windblown tree that is shaped by the slope of the hill that it grows in, and by the direction of the wind and the sun. Your body is the same.

For example, did you know that in the last few months of pregnancy most babies lie in the uterus on the left hand side of their mother’s pelvis? In this position, the baby’s face is pointing toward the mother’s spine, which limits the infant’s movement.

That means that stresses and strains in the body have already begun.

Osteopathic therapists know how to read the story your body tells about the stresses and strains you’ve experienced in a lifetime. By tracking that story back to the original event, osteopathy is able to heal in a way that other therapies cannot do.

2. The Health of the Joints Around the Injured Area

One of the first things an osteopathic therapist will do is check whether the joints near your injury are flexible and doing their fare share of the work.

Injury in one area can lead to the overuse of other areas as your body tries to compensate.

When we look at ankle injuries, this kind of chain reaction is obvious. A painful ankle will cause you to limp. The limp will put strain on your other leg and your back. You may find yourself complaining: “I have a sprained ankle and now my back hurts!”

When the injury is new, it’s easy to make the connection between having a sore ankle and getting a sore back a few days later.

The connection can be easily missed if your ankle injury is old, but the connection still exists.

Over time, your ankle has stopped hurting. Maybe it is just a bit stiff compared to the other side. Your body will make up for the stiffness by getting the next few joints above your ankle to move more.

The chain reaction has begun.

Over time, your knee, hip and lower back all end up doing more work than they should. And you end up with back pain because you sprained your ankle.

Osteopathic therapists are like detectives. They solve the mystery of your pains and injuries by reading the clues your body leaves.

3. About Fluids: “The Rule of the Artery is Supreme”

Osteopathy was first formulated by an American Doctor who thought a lot about the importance of good fluid movement in the body.  He coined the phrase, ‘The rule of the artery reins supreme’.  By this he meant that when blood and lymph flow freely, the tissues (muscles, nerves, fascia etc) work as they should.  With injury or other kinds of trauma the tissues contract, twist and compress.  The fluid flow becomes obstructed.  Tiny areas of poor blood flow and poor fluid drainage result.  These areas are considered to be a significant underlying cause of poor healing and disease.

We aim to restore movement to restricted areas of the body.  With this restoration of movement areas that have been congested can be properly serviced by the circulatory system.  A great example of this is when a client comes to us with one ankle that is always a little swollen by the end of the day.  We usually discover that this person’s hip (on the same side) is restricted and that the muscles of their leg (on the same side) are tight.  Fluid in the legs has to work against gravity to get back up to the heart.  The slightest restriction at any of the major joints will impact the free flow of fluid as it travels back ‘up stream’ to be recycled by the heart.

Osteopathic treatment helps liberate congested tissues by restoring motion to body areas that have been restricted.

4. The Amount of Stress You Have in Your Life

Your body can’t tell the difference between different sources of stress. It reacts the same way whether you’re hearing bad financial news or being surprised in a dark alley.

Your heart rate goes up. You get a shot of adrenaline. Your body shunts the blood away from your digestive system into your muscles. The flight or fight response has kicked in and you are ready to run or fight.

The problem is that most of the time there is nowhere to run and no one to fight.

You have to stay in the situation that generated the stress in the first place – sitting in the meeting, preparing the kids a rushed meal, caught in a traffic jam – while your body would much prefer that you run off the adrenaline.

When these situations happen over and over, you end up with continuously raised levels of adrenaline. This has a big effect on the way your body heals.

Your ability to tune into what makes you feel well begins to erode.

• The blood flow to your digestive system decreases, which affects your ability to absorb nutrients. When your digestion is affected, you don’t have the building blocks you need to recuperate.
• Your Immune system gets dampened down because your body has decided there isn’t ‘time’ to get ill – the implications of this over a long period of time is obvious – your ability to get well from simple things like colds and coughs is reduced.
• Chronic postural changes that lead to head aches and joint pain because people hold themselves unconsciously with the expression of the stress they are experiencing e.g. an attitude of anxiety with the head held far forwards of your centre of gravity or an attitude of fear with the shoulders rounded and the chest sunken.

The effects of long-term stress can’t be fixed with a single session of osteopathic therapy. But your first appointment will guide us in helping you set realistic expectations as to the rate of your recovery.

And we can help you with different techniques that lower your body’s response to stress every day.

You’ll definitely see the difference osteopathy can make.

5. Your Balance

You probably take your balance for granted – until something goes wrong.

Technically, your awareness of your position and movement through space is called proprioception. (It comes from the Latin words meaning being receptive to your own.)

Good proprioceptive awareness helps you avoid injury and speeds recovery.

Little sensors in your joints send vital information to your brain about how your body is moving. They can get damaged from injury or just not be very efficient from lack of use. When they don’t work effectively, your reflex response time slows.

They need to be switched back on.

Osteopathic therapy does this by using specific manipulations and specialised treatment to your joints and muscles.

We follow these up by giving you exercises to increase your proprioceptive awareness.

6. Surgeries and Scars

If you’ve had surgery, you have scars. No matter how minor or serious the surgery, all scars have one thing in common: they do not move like the tissue that was there before.

Collagen is the building block of all tissue in your body. When a scar forms, the collagen is not laid down in the same orientation as in the surrounding skin, fascia or muscle.

Because of this, the body has to deal with different input from the neuromuscular receptors that register stimuli such as stretch and movement.

By itself, this may not be a problem. But if the scar is deep and goes through many layers of tissue, the way it would after abdominal surgery, there will be a lot of altered information about the body’s movement through space.

This can lead to a change in the way the body moves.

If your body copes well, this change is unlikely to be a problem.

If your ability to change the way you move has been compromised, you may start to see problems.

For example, let’s say you have an old ankle fracture that leads to a stiff ankle. Maybe alone, it isn’t a problem. Then you have appendix surgery, which alters the way your hip and lower back move. Now you have scar tissue at either end of your leg and that changes the way your leg moves.

The next thing you know, your knee is in a vulnerable position.

An important part of our questioning is to find out from you about old injuries and surgeries so that we can assess the impact the scar tissue is having on you.  We can then work on breaking down scar tissue to help you regain flexibility, nerve health, blood flow and promote regeneration of connective tissue.

7. Dental Work

Chewing is something we do without having to think about it. The teeth are extraordinarily sensitive – the slightest change in pressure on a tooth exerts an immediate response – not only in the muscles of the jaw but right the way through the body.

According to researcher Simon King, this sensitivity of the teeth to pressure is often the hidden factor behind many injuries. He claims that fillings that aren’t filed to exactly the correct height can cause postural problems throughout the body. In his book, Live Without Pain, he goes further and outlines mechanisms of how having two different types of metal, an amalgam filling and a gold crown, in the mouth can cause a voltage to pass between them, approximately 175mV. On average it takes 70mV for a muscle to fire. The body can react to this by inhibiting certain muscles of the head and neck, which in turn will cause altered movement and subsequent strains lower down in the body.

I’ve  had extraordinary responses by asking people with shoulder, neck and head pain about fillings and dentistry.

This is why the history of your dental surgery is important in finding out the true causes of your pain.

8. Injuries to the Top and Bottom of the Spine

Have you ever bumped your head or fallen on your tailbone?

Do you ever have lower back pain or headaches?

Did you know the two could be connected?

The connection is a membrane called the dura. The dura is a strong, fibrous lining inside the skull that surrounds your brain. It extends like a tube from the head down the spine all the way to the sacrum. It contains a lot of nerves and can cause pain if it is restricted somewhere along it’s course.

There is no stretch in the dura. When it moves at one end, it has to move at the other. If you hit your head or fall on your tailbone, you inevitably affect the dura, which connects to the rest of your spine.

When you hit your head or tailbone, the tension transmitted to the dura can alter the micro-movements of the 26 separate bones in your skull.  Or it can cause a few segments of your spine to stop moving properly.  Or it can restrict your sacrum or your coccyx.  This is why some people get terrible headaches after a serious fall to their tailbone.  For others it may feel like an area of stiffness that a spinal manipulation can’t free up.

Osteopathic treatment of the dura uses very subtle techniques to work at a deep level in the body.  Osteopathy is the origin of craniosacral therapy (known by osteopaths as cranial osteopathy).

When you first see us, we will ask you about any blows, trips or slips that you may have overlooked or disregarded as insignificant.  This information gives us clues for what to feel for with our hands.

We can feel the slight movement between the bones of your skull when we do very gentle work on your head. We will be able to tell if that healthy movement is obstructed or restricted.

 

If a fall or a blow has caused a dysfunction in the link between your head and your sacrum, we can use cranial osteopathic techniques to help release the dura and allow your body the best chance of recovery.

9. The Health of Your Organs

Many therapists miss the connection between the health of your organs and any injuries or pain you may be experiencing.

Many people with low back pain have low back pain because of digestive problems or menstrual problems – it’s important to know why this happens so that you can be aware and know that your low back may not be helped by massage but in fact may be helped by treatment that helps your digestive system!

Lets look at 2 examples of how your organs can impact your muscles and joints that we see over and over again that surprise people:

Your Lungs, Your Ribcage and Your Mid-Back

Let’s say your lungs are not working well. Perhaps you’ve had bouts of pneumonia or you’re a smoker. Or maybe your ribs have been injured in some way.

Your lungs and your ribcage are virtually inseparable. When the lungs move, the ribs move, and vice-versa.

Stiff or damaged ribs mean the lungs will not inflate or deflate to their potential. On the other hand, a scarred or unhealthy lung will not let the ribs move as much as they would like.

Either situation changes how well your mid-back works because the ribs attach to the spine.

So if your lungs are not working well, you may well have pain in your mid-back.

Your Kidneys and Your Knees

All your digestive organs are connected to the supporting structure of your spine with ligaments and connective tissue known as fascia.

Problems with digestion, especially diarrhea or constipation, can pull on the ligaments and fascia that attach your digestive organs to your spine.

Over time, these small strains can affect the joints, muscles and ligaments of your back and alter movement. This can then lead to a cascade of events from local irritation of the spine to pain further away from the site.

An example of this is how a past kidney infection can cause knee pain.

The muscles in your hip that allow you to move your leg are called hip flexors. The fascia surrounding your kidney is connected to a deep hip flexor called the psoas muscle.

After a kidney infection, the fascia of the kidney can become scarred. In the same way that heat shrinks a piece of plastic wrap, scarring can shrink the fascia. As a result the fascia becomes less flexible.

Since the psoas and kidney are connected by fascia, the function of the psoas is also affected when the fascia is scarred.

If the fascia is scarred, it may cause the psoas to move differently when it controls your hip. Your hip is a strong joint, so it is unlikely to become sore.

Your knee, however, is the next joint in the chain and it does not have the advantage of lots of muscle to protect it the way the hip does. It can easily become irritated and sore, especially between the patella and the femur.

So,  you can see that a you don’t necessarily have to live with pain from a stubborn injury, you really need to find the cause.
Here’s another tip that might help you.  Don’t give up on a type of therapy just because it didn’t work the first time.  I’ve treated people in the past with what I thought was a good treatment, but only to find out there wasn’t any change.  It was the right treatment from the right therapist just at the wrong time! The patients I have in mind sometimes came back to me after getting further investigations or a break from therapy and then I managed to help them!  i.e the right treatment, the right therapist at the right time!

There are lots of iterations of this,  for example, the right therapy from the wrong therapist etc etc.

So don’t give up on physio, chiro, osteo or whatever therapy you are trying just because it didn’t work the first time.  Ask you practitioner to dig deeper and find the cause!

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