12/22/2025
Shared with permission from a colleague, Mauricio Kruchik
This describes the "magic" of Reflexology very well!
REFLEXOLOGY AND 'THE ENERGETICS'
7000+ nerve endings at your service
A friend of mine, with a mixture of irony and affection, often calls us those who work with manual therapies "the energetic", as if we were part of a caste of magicians who believe that by touching here something happens there without too much explanation. It made me laugh at first, but over time I understood that that label says less about what we do and more about how, sometimes, we explain it, because when language is not accompanied by the experience, the message becomes confusing and legitimate amazement turns into skepticism.
And it is understandable that it is so, because it is difficult to imagine that from a specific point of the foot can be influenced a distant organ, a complete system or an altered function, and that such contact, sustained over time, can help a person recover quality living in the face of persistent pain, a chronic disease, autoimmune or even an oncological process. However, what is often overlooked is that each foot houses more than 7,000 nerve terminations, an extraordinary density that makes the foot one of the most sensitive and communicative surfaces of the human body, capable of receiving stimulus, integrating them and transmitting information to the nervous system.
Reflexology does not work from urgency nor promises immediate effects, because its logic is not that of impact but that of adaptation, and therefore requires patience, perseverance and respect for biological times. By stimulating reflex areas, you do not seek to impose a change, but to offer the body new sensory references so that it can reorganize itself from within, something that the nervous system only does when it feels accompanied and not forced. This process does not aim to silence a symptom, but to activate internal reserves that the body already possesses and that, for various reasons, have become numb.
From the outside, this mode of work may seem mysterious or even difficult to believe, but from everyday practice it is an exercise of constant observation, where changes are not usually spectacular but progressive, and where the true value of treatment is measured in the person's ability to Re-inhabit your body with less pain, greater functionality, and a more stable sense of well-being, even when illness is still present.
Here appears an uncomfortable question that is rarely formulated out loud: if there are approaches that work by awakening the body's natural regulation mechanisms, why is it so insisted on demanding "medical evidence" without generating the contexts where that evidence could emerge? Reflexology rarely has access to hospital settings, systematic monitoring programs, or continuous clinical measurement tools, and then is blamed for the lack of quantifiable data. Maybe not a casual contradiction.
Not because the medical system is hostile by definition, but because it is structured to respond quickly, protocolized and pharmacologically to symptoms, while therapies like Reflexology work on a different logic: they do not replace functions or block signals, but they accompany slow, deep and difficult processes of standardize. They don't hide the symptom, they communicate with the cause. And that, in a model focused on readiness and control, is uncomfortable.
The difficulty, then, is not in the absence of results, but in the nature of those results, which are not always encapsulated in a drug, a dose or an isolated statistic. Reflexology does not promise miraculous cures; it proposes something quieter and, perhaps therefore, more challenging: to help the body remember how to self-regulate.
Perhaps we are not the energetic after all, but people who learned to listen to the body from a place that usually goes unnoticed, and perhaps the real challenge is not to convince anyone, but to learn to explain clearly what happens when one of the areas most richly stimulated nerves of the human body with knowledge, time and respect. Maybe because when the language is honed, the practice ceases to seem like a mystery... and it begins to show its true depth.
Or is it that the depths scare you?
Have you ever tried Reflexology?
