18/05/2022
Manual Therapy
The hand is a wonderful instrument with a double mission: to create and to perceive.
Since antiquity, it has been known that the hand is man's own. It is the hand that allows him to undertake appropriate actions and responses to his environment, either directly or through tools. All the all technology we currently know comes from the power of man’s hands.
In addition to its possibilities of action, the hand possesses a faculty of perception linked to the sense of touch. This sense is not limited only to the hand. The entire epidermis is equipped with sensitive receptors that allow it to know or recognize its environment. Therefore, the hand plays a huge role in the perception of touch.
The hand brings unique and irreplaceable information about the external environment in which we find ourselves. It allows for a very special contact and communication that all craftsmen and manual workers can witness, and attest.
In therapy, the hand also has its importance. The hand is able to receive and transmit information about any sort of dysfunction, and, in reverse, it also has the power to heal through energetic palpation, manipulation and re-harmonization according to the needs of the patient's body.
Through its fluidity, and incredible sensitivity, the hand holds perception secretes that no other machine can compete with, even nowadays. It is able to gracefully channel psychosomatic information, and as a response to the latter, it operate and heals through sensory and energetic techniques.
As for palpation, it was and remains an important means of investigation. It naturally finds its place in the establishment of a diagnosis or auscultation.
While touching may be synonym to skin contact, palpation on the other hand is meant to derive information through touch. Palpation informs the practitioner about what he or she is touching. This examination time must Not be mixed or confused with the time of actual manual work performed By the practitioner during massage, mobilization or manipulation.
According to H. Barth, therapeutic palpation is defined as: "a method of exploration using fingers or the whole hand, targeted towards the external parts of the body and accessible cavities, to get an idea of the physical qualities of the tissues, and to learn at the same time about the consistency, elasticity, mobility, vibrations, temperature and finally about the sensitivity of the various organs".
This palpation exam helps establish a treatment plan both manually and movement based. Manual therapy seeks to restore the mobility, vitality, biological and energetic rhythm of the body by allowing it to regain its physiological mobility.
Movement, from the very early stages of life on earth, always played a crucial role in the evolution of living beings. It is a witness, a means, a manifestation and a tool.
The birth of movement, related with the first nervous systems patters, represents an enormous step in evolution. It probably allowed living beings to increase their chances of survival, adaptation and to invent other forms of life.
On an individual level, movement is at the heart of toddler development process. It is a priority in the way in which a baby encounters the world and begins to understand it. In return, each new understanding opens the door to new experiences and therefore new sensations. During this phase, there is a strong relationship between movement and thoughts that is created, where the two are in constant dialogue and every piece of
information from one enriches the other.
This confirms the fundamental place of body movement in the incredible process that shapes a sensitive and unique human being. This process does not begin at birth, as we tend to think, but from conception.
Following this reasoning, the human body is actually considered as a book where each letter becomes an indication of what works, and what doesn’t, in this extraordinary edifice!
The manual therapist is then supposed to create a communication language between himself/herself and the patient's body in the absence of harmony, through his hands.
This link is established by the patient's muscle tone: his/her reactions to each piece of information captured in the past, present or even forecasted, as the tonic function remains the vehicle of a strong emotional charge. Like a “pre-word” language that continues to speak before or even beyond language.
The poor distribution of body tensions is an obstacle to the natural ease of the body, but also to the psychological fluidity of the person; because it works both ways: a very high tonicity is a sign of an emotional overload, or an excess of stress; and in return, it maintains the difficulty which is at its origin.
Like animals that stiffen their limbs in the face of danger, man stiffens its body in the face of a difficult situation, whether physical or psychological, occasional or permanent. These attitudes, postures, gestures etc continue to have a meaning for the interlocutor.. a meaning that sometimes outweighs/takes over the words (for example, we easily recognize discomfort/shy-ness through body posture, without even hearing the person expressing him or her self about that feeling)
