01/22/2024
I had a client, let’s call him Roe, come in with no pain complaints. While eliminating pain is often the goal of the work, it’s not such an important assessment tool. Compensation patterns can be in place for a long time before they finally cause enough structural strain to cause tissue damage or pain.
The posture assessment revealed his whole body was turned slightly to the right - including his head! When looking forward, he actually would look slightly out of the left side of both eyes. This gave him a bit of a fun, mischievous look!
Left unresolved, this compensation pattern could eventually cause strain in his right hip, ankle or knee and leave him vulnerable to injury. Fortuntately, we caught it before it was even noticeable.
Roe’s history included a decade-old deep cut just above his left ear. Palpation revealed deep adhesions here, through the bone of the skull and right into the meningies (the connective tissues around the brain, the spinal cord). The sclera of the eye is just an extension of the dura- the outermost of the brain’s meninges, so looking to the right strained these adhesions and Roe’s body rotated right to compensate.
The connection into the meninges was confirmed when the scar tissue around the ear was pulled tight when Roe lifted their right leg, as if they were doing a nerve tension test.
The treatment was an extension of the final assessment. I pinned the scar tissue, and Roe pulled on his brain by tensioning the sciatic nerve with his right leg. After this intervention Roe’s eye movements were more relaxed, his mischievous side eye was gone and his posture had straightened. He felt more stable. Several days later, he reported continuing to feel amazed at how easy it was to look around and that he could now look out of the corner of his eye without pain. He had been so habituated to the pain that it felt normal. The pain was there, but he didn’t know to complain about it!
