I
have been involved with alternative medicines on and off throughout my life and
I instinctively began to try to work out what to follow up regarding this
increasingly debilitating aching leg. A
friend suggested I might benefit from Myofascial Release, about which I had
never heard, but after some researching I arranged to meet up with Emma Gilmore
early in 2014. I have seen her pretty
much every three weeks since then and, yes, the treatment has – bit by bit –
made an enormous difference to my leg and to my general well being. Twelve
years ago I dug up a whole garden, but before I met Emma I had got to the point
where I didn’t have the flexibility or the inclination to bend or reach over to
pull up even a weed – but now, whilst I might not yet dig up a whole garden, I
will attack and tidy a bed of shrubs and flowers and even undertake pruning (when
does not require a ladder). Who knows what tomorrow will bring!
Myofascial
release therapy works on the knowledge that an intricate labyrinth of myofascia
weaves its way throughout our bodies covering and surrounding every muscle,
bone, nerve, artery and all internal organs and, because it is a continuous
structure, it connects every part of the body to every other part. Myofascial
release is just that – a means of releasing myofascia that because of trauma or
inflammation has been damaged or has lost its pliability. Because the myofascia
is connected all round the body any damage in one place can have a spin off
impact in other areas of the body.
The
myofascia release therapist, after taking a case history, will want you to
remove your top layer of clothes and lie on a table. He/she will then put
pressure on parts of the body that s(he) thinks may have relevance to the
presenting problem – often it will be an obvious area (on your neck if you have
presented a sore neck), but often it can be elsewhere, which, through the connections
of the myofascia network, might also be influencing the problem. The hand
pressure is placed for many minutes, quietly, gently. Apparently the therapist
can often feel activity or heat under his/ her hands and, with practice, the
patient can begin to feel tingling or twitching in response in other parts of
the body. For me, with each treatment I have become increasingly aware of what
is going on in my whole body whilst I am lying under the therapist’s hands.
Let
me give an example from my case – this left leg and foot. Obviously in the
first sessions, pressure was mainly put
on parts of that leg, but it was also put on parts of the other leg which
sometimes led to responses (twitches, tingling) in the first leg. Then Emma began
to wonder if the base of my back had any connection with the pains in my leg –
I have had recurring back pain for twenty years – so she worked on that and
there were a couple of times, for example, when to my amazement the pressure on
my back triggered the profound shooting pains up from my toes, so something was
certainly happening! (And for the record, my back has definitely improved as a
result of her work there, too.) By now in my treatment journey, the pain and
discomfort in my left leg had all but disappeared but we had become aware that
there was a tendency for my ankles and feet to get puffy, particularly in the
right leg. By now Emma was working on the scar of my colon cancer operation. In
the operation I had had many lymph nodes removed which might now be affecting
the leg and the causing the oedema. In recent treatment sessions, when she has
been putting pressure on my leg – note, my leg - I can have quite strong twinges underneath my
scar of my stomach : nowhere else, just underneath my scar. And this is where
we have got to so far – I am hoping, nay expecting, that the work on my scar
will help my oedema, that it will assist in strengthening both legs and that it
will help my battered colon, not to mention my body as a whole. It is not the
end of the journey for me by any means.
If you need any more information Emma Gilmore our resident Myofascial specialist will be on hand to answer any questions about your health issues.
