suhre@trwrba.UUCP (Maurice E. Suhre) (01/16/85)
Rolfing is a bodywork process which stretches the fascia and
musculature. The recipient generally experiences a feeling of
looseness and being lighter. If the back pain is caused by
excessive tension, then I believe Rolfing will help. I suggest
looking at the before/after pictures in Ida Rolf's book, entitled
Rolfing (surprise).
At the yoga class, the instructress often referred to Mensedich
Corrective Exercises. I inquired and I believe there is a book
call Have a Healthy Back (or something similar) and the author
was Mensedich. I don't own the book, and cannot vouch for my
spelling (the pronunciation was "mensa deek").
There was an interview on TV with a Dr. Selna (?) who has recently
published a book. The gist of his position is that the pain is
real, but is a manifestation of living problems. Somewhat like
stomach trouble. This may have been on the MacNeil Lehrer report.
Anyway, his book might be of interest.
Maurice
{decvax,sdcrdcf,hplabs,ucbvax}!trwrb!suhreariels@orca.UUCP (Ariel Shattan) (01/21/85)
> Rolfing is a bodywork process which stretches the fascia and > musculature. The recipient generally experiences a feeling of > looseness and being lighter. If the back pain is caused by > excessive tension, then I believe Rolfing will help. I suggest > looking at the before/after pictures in Ida Rolf's book, entitled > Rolfing (surprise). > Oh, PLEASE don't try rolfing! Not if your back already hurts badly. Rolfing is a very violent rearrangement of muscles, and if you have something wrong with your back (disk out of place, or some such), rolfing may make it worse. If you suspect muscle tension, there's always massage and relaxation excercizes. If the back trouble is the result of an injury, you might try a chiropractor (but, if the first thing the chiropractor wants to do is sell you $100.00 worth of x-rays, find another chiropractor, QUICKLY. A skilled and ethical chiropractor can figure out what's out of alignment and fix it by feel.) Yoga and streaching excercises are good, gentle ways to coax your body into shape. If you already hurt, you don't want to anything wild or overly active to stress your already inflamed muscles and nerves. Ariel
steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (01/23/85)
> > Oh, PLEASE don't try rolfing! Not if your back already hurts badly. > Rolfing is a very violent rearrangement of muscles, and if you have > something wrong with your back (disk out of place, or some such), > rolfing may make it worse. > Rolfing is painful. Try Alexander or Feldenkrais. Both are gentle but extremely powerful methods of bodywork. The work is on the muscles and not the spine itself. The theory is the the spine is flexible and that the way a person carries themselves is responsible for pain. Feldenkrais has had an amazing affect on my entire posture. At one time my feet pointed more outwards. This forces my pelivis in a weird postion. It has not caused me any problems, but when I was taking lessons in non-verbal communication from a mime, he pointed it out and suggested a chiropracter. I met a person that does Feldenkrais work and in one session my feet started pointing forward like they should and my whole body evened out. My wife has serious scoliosious (curved spine). Only a few sessions have almost permenently straightened her out. It is the opinion of people who do Feldenkrais body work or Alexander body word, that chiropracters are dangerous. They actually manipulate the skeleton and can cause serious permenent damage. Straightening the skelton fixes the symptom, not the cause. Feldenkrais wrote a book of exercises called: Awarness Through Movement Moshe Feldenkrais Harper and Row He wrote a book that is about his basic philosophy with some exercises called: The Elusive Obvious Moshe Feldenkrais this book and a book about the Feldenkrais method, "The Feldenkrais Method: Teaching by Handling", by Rywerant are available from: Grinder, DeLozier & Associates 110 Kenny Court Santa Cruz, Calif. 95065 -- scc!steiny Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382 109 Torrey Pine Terr. Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060 ihnp4!pesnta -\ fortune!idsvax -> scc!steiny ucbvax!twg -/
andrea@hp-sdd.UUCP (andrea) (02/24/85)
> >but, if the first thing the chiropractor >wants to do is sell you $100.00 worth of x-rays, find another >chiropractor, QUICKLY. A skilled and ethical chiropractor can figure >out what's out of alignment and fix it by feel.) > >Ariel Ariel, my experience with chiropractors tends to bear this out, except for an important exception: the most skillful, ethical, and intuitive chiropractor will still want an xray (and be happy to accept a recent one which another doctor took!) if he suspects there has been a herniated or ruptured disk, or an actual break in the bones. If you have been previously given a clean bill of health from an MD, so that it is clear that the problem is in the skeletal alignment and attendant muscle tension, rather than physical damage, then asking for an x-ray is either a money- making ploy or a coverup for lack of palpation skills. > > It is the opinion of people who do Feldenkrais body >work or Alexander body word, that chiropracters are dangerous. >They actually manipulate the skeleton and can cause serious >permenent damage. Straightening the skelton fixes the symptom, >not the cause. > >Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382 Don, I've heard this one before...I'd like to address it, because many people who could benefit from chiropractic have been kept from it by myths and distortions. First, they do manipulate the skeleton. So does any masseuse, so do you when you do a yoga stretch. If the chiropractor is trained and licensed, he (or she) has the knowledge and skill to avoid doing damage. Avoiding chiropractors because they manipulate skeletons is like avoiding surgeons because they cut people up -- in both cases, you want to make sure the practitioner knows exactly what they're doing, and in neither case would you undergo treatment without good cause, but in both cases there are problems which are suitably treated that way. The more modern chiropractors have been learning zero-force techniques, which consists of leading the person gently through motions that create enough space for the bones to spontaneously rearrange themselves into more functional, less painful configurations. I have never known anyone to be damaged by this kind of adjustment. As for the symptom vs. the cause - that's a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and any GOOD chiropractor will tell you point blank that the adjustment will not hold unless you do exercises and/or get therapy to correct the mis-use of your body which either led to it or has resulted from living with the misalignment. Because the causality works both ways: when your spine is misaligned, all of the muscles in the region are unnaturally stressed. Some will be overly stretched and become weak, and some will be compressed and contracted. Without followup work (yoga, massage, Trager, Feldenkrais, Alexander, Hellerwork, etc), the maladapted muscles will pull the spine back into the unpleasant conformation. Sometimes the muscle imbalance causes the spinal misalignment, and sometimes the spinal misalignment comes first (as in sudden wrenching of the back, auto accidents, etc.). I'm delighted to hear that your experience with Feldenkrais was so effective! It seems to me that the repatterning work like this is more effective on chronic postural imbalances than chiropractic, and that both chiropractic and repatterning are useful for acute problems (such as whiplash). One other thing I'd like to mention in passing - I hope this is not the case with the practitioners you are working with, but I have noticed a distressing tendency for practitioners to denigrate any modality other than their own. It's bad enough having to deal with the AMA bad-mouthing everyone except their own, and trying underhanded tactics to put homeopaths, chiropractors, and anyone else they can target out of business. (Although this is starting to change -- there are more and more MD's who embrace all forms of health care, in the interest of helping their patients as much as possible.) It's even worse when it happens in the "alternative health" field, since all of the modalities complement each other, and we have so much to gain by broadening rather than narrowing our experience. Remember the old saw, "to a man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail"? As I worked my way through the Holistic Health Practitioner program at Mueller College (about 1200 hours), I took classes and workshops in many different techniques -- and in many different paradigms. The Trager instructors derided "plowing up muscles", the macrobiotic instructors dismiss everything as irrelevent or secondary except for diet (just about everything seems to be caused by an excess of meat or sugar, in their eyes - down to ankle sprain), the psychologists explained anything and everything with P_A_C diagrams, the deep tissue folks believed that anything that didn't hurt probably wasn't helping, the reflexologists believed they could cure all kinds of ailments by breaking up crystals around the nerve-endings in the feet, the clinical ecologists thought that most everything that hurt was an allergic reaction to something, the spiritual healers knew for a fact that all physical ailments were caused by blocked chakras, the movement therapists believed the body would rearrange itself if used properly, and the teachers in various oriental healing arts concluded that most problems were stagnant chi. And you know what? they were all right, and they were all wrong. Every single one of them had techniques which were useful, and theories which explained some people's dis-ease better than anyone else. And not one of their paradigms was totally sufficient for all cases. Being eager to learn, but unwilling to turn off my rational mind, the conclusion I came to was that that maps are not the territory, that even putting all possible maps together falls short of the territory, and that the most beneficial approach was to apply one's native intelligence and problem-solving skills to selecting the most appropriate map to use for the problem at hand. (After all, a Thomas Brothers' map isn't much help when you're prospecting for gold, and a geological survey map won't get you to the airport on time.) The worst fallacy we can fall into is believing that anything not on our map is not real or useful. (whew! I think you hit a trigger point, there... I didn't mean this as a personal vendetta, and I want you to know that I have a great deal of respect for what Feldenkrais practitioners can do. It is useful, however, to occasionally question how and why it serves people to denigrate other ways of doing things. As for how it serves me to spend my time expounding on these matters to the ghosts in the machine, well -- I've gotten hooked on map collecting! ;-> Andrea Frankel, Hewlett-Packard (San Diego Division) (619) 487-4100 x4664 net: {allegra|ihnp4|decvax|ucbvax}!hplabs!hp-sdd!andrea ...searchlights casting for faults in the clouds of delusion