Nerves Rule

Nerves rule — not only because they control heart rate and muscle tone. Nerves rule because they’re an integral part of the immune response and the inflammatory mechanism of the body and because inflamed nerves limit and distort the movement of joints. And joints are where the actions is.. Since you’ve read this far, you may want to prepare yourself to have some of your beliefs challenged concerning the way your body works.

Neuro-fascial integration has two goals - to relieve suffering and to enable the body to function with balance and fluidity. These are not unrelated. Both are a function of the the nerve’s ability to stretch when joints are flexed and to glide within tissues when movement occurs. When stretch and glide are compromised, movement is restricted and pain sets in.

Neuro-fascial integration draws upon the structural insights of Ida Rolf, the peripheral and cranial nerve work of French Osteopath, Jean Pierre Barral, and the neurological studies of a group of Australian physical therapists.

Introduction - How we got the way we did

These inflammatory states and problems with peripheral nerves are closely related. 1) The formation of scar tissue causes the nerves to become tethered in the tissue - restricting their glide. When the glide is impaired, the nerve bundle becomes a restrictive force on the optimum movement of the joint. It doesn’t matter the size or location of the joint. Later we’ll discuss how an unbending toe can trow off your gait.

It could as easily be a hip joint. The restrictions cause altered motion. 2) The nerve bundles themselves can become inflamed, limiting the stretch of the bundle, thus causing further joint hypomobility and neuropathic pain. 3) Intraneural inflammation — inflammation within a nerve bundle — often leads to aberrant firing of the nerves in the inflamed bundle, causing the excitation of the motor nerves which produces muscle spasm as well as the above-mentioned pain.

We typically think of joint restriction as a problem of tight muscle or of scar tissue or arthritic changes and these are all often involved

The Fascial Matrix

Fascia in a miracle fabric. You may know it as the membranous sheath on the chicken breast, or the glistening white stuff on the leg of lamb, but it’s much more. Fascia is also a highly responsive tissue. It can be tough and hard or soft and delicate. It has tremendous mechanical resistance and can transmute mechanical force into electrical signals. Fascia separates the many compartments and spaces of the body and and connects them at the same time. The fascial matrix communicates with each cell in the entire body. Via proteins that cross the membrane of the cells, the fascial network is continuous with the interior structure of each cell and transmits mechanical and electrical changes in the macroscopic structure to the cellular level.

Fascia is a matrix - an intricate network of collagen fibers that extends into every microscopic reach of the body - contacting and influencing every cell with proteins that cross cell membranes and communicate with the interior.

Inflammation

Inflammation is a process that exists at various levels of intensity in most bodies much of the time. It degrades collagen, the stuff that makes up fascia. It activates immune cells. It is the process behind most of our disease states. If unchecked it is incompatible with life. Yet we wouldn’t live a week without it. Inflammation is a tremedously powerful, mostly unseen, process. When inflammation is initiated within the nervous system, it creates havoc. It causes nerves to fire more easily - creating excitability at whatever location it occurs.

The Neural Net

The nervous system is what organizes our world. There’s no such thing as an angry glance, a gentle touch, a sullen sky or a warm hello. It’s all in our interpretation. And the interpretation is a function of microscopic strands of excitable gel. If the gels don’t excite, there is no world.

There’s also no right way to stand. You learned to stand and to move in a dance with the world around you. What works is a matter of many tries and often many errors. You may have learned to feel the sweet rush of air filling your chest as you bask in another’s admiration, or you learned to duck your head if a parent frequently slapped you in anger. These may be part of your world. They’re part of how we learn to present ourselves, and what we learn is coded in the pathways of the nervous system and fascia.

It’s a system of enormous complexity and sensitivity — so many, many trillions of tiny inputs, such an array of possible responses. We pay attention to the inputs that pay off. We select the responses that seem to work the best, given the information we have. We thrive — or we just manage to cope. It’s written in the excitable gels.

Some of us stoop in unconscious fright. Some of us hold ourselves with military rigidity - perhaps to avoid stooping. Sometimes the best balance we can find is at the extremes, living on the edge with little room for repose.

Nerves are part of the motor apparatus and the sensory network, but they are also part of the immune and endocrine system.

Nerves create inflammation by secreting protein neurotransmitters into local tissue. For instance, when you have an injury, pain fibers bombard the spinal cord with input. If the bombardment is intense enough and long enough, the centers in the spinal cord alter their behavior and fire back down the same fibers to release inflammatory neuropeptides in the area that was injured. If that bombardment originates within a nerve bundle, that’s where the inflammation occurs.

Intraneural inflammation is a major source (if not the major source) of chronic pain. Over and over , in my practice, when the inflammatory swelling in the nerve subsides, the client’s experience of pain abates. In addition to inducing pain, inflamed nerves limit movement at joints due to swelling and because they become tethered in the surrounding tissues.

The relationship of this matrix to the nervous system is profound. Each nerve cell and its extensions, the axons, are sheathed in a loose arrangement of fascial fibers. Bundles of nerves are covered with a denser, water-tight sheath. Bundles of bundles, the nerve trunks, have yet another fascial covering. This all adds up to a concentration of a lot of fascia in a small diameter bundle - a bundle which crosses joints, sometimes several joints, and potentially limits their movement.

The reduction of joint motion can have big consequences.

The Trouble with Toes

In this simple example of nerve restriction, the big toe doesn’t bend when the joint is loaded, like during push-off when walking. The image below shows the correct mobility of the toe. The toes support the weight as it is transferred to the other leg.

The action of the toes is important to the way the force of walking is transmitted through the body. That includes the relations of the sacrum with the pelvis and thus the stability of the lumbar spine. When the big toe doesn’t bend, the body must find a “walk-around” — either with a shuffle or by rotating the foot and pronating so the rigidity of the toe doesn’t interfere with the gait. Both “solutions” create problems which may show up over time.

What causes the rigid toe is not a muscle or a tendon or even arthritis (though that may become involved). It is caused by small nerves that innervate the toe and which become inflamed or tied up in the surrounding tissue. Because the nerve won’t stretch, the toe won’t bend. In order for the toe to dorsiflex, the nerves (in yellow in the image) must stretch and glide all the way from the spinal cord. Any fixations, particularly in the foot, severely limit the motion of the toe. The Neuro-Fascial Integration solution relieves fixations and reduces inflammation to allow smooth movement of the nerve.

When nerves become inflamed, the resulting pain can be disabling. The fluid which accumulate within the nerve bundle exerts pressure on the nerves. Compression or stretching the nerve increases the pressure and causes the nerve to fire at the site of irritation.

This firing causes pain fibers (nociceptors) to deliver a barrage of input to the spinal cord and causes motor nerves to activate the muscles they innervate - causing spasm.

The Whole Structure

Joint immobility or restriction and neuropathic pain are only part of the puzzle. Whenever there has been an injury or a pattern of misusing the body, the whole structure compensates.

Tethering of nerves in the arm can pull the head forward. Inflammation of nerves crossing the pelvis cause low back and pelvic distortions.

The ultimate goal is to allow the body to find the optimum line of support, from the feet resting easily on the ground, through the knees and hips, to the spine feeling the firm support of the sacrum, to the head resting gently on top of the spinal column.

Neuro-Fascial Technique

The technique involves gentle pressure to reduce intraneural inflammation, and a variety of manual strategies to disengage the nerves from restricting tissues — thereby improving both stretch and glide.