158A. The Power of Touch

Touch is a powerful physical and emotional healing tool. As we adopt non social technology these amazing abilities are drifting into the sphere of mythology. I set the record before that happens.

Here in 158A I explain how Touch works and what can be done with it. In 159B I will explain how the changing attitudes and perceptions of Touch are affecting society. Hint: it’s not a positive change.

What Do I Mean By Touch?

When I talk about Touch here, I am talking about science-based application of manual pressure in various forms to tissues in the body, often muscles deep in the body. This is not skin caressing like casual massage that requires little education, and which can have an “entertainment” quality associated with it. The treatment of injuries, especially old injuries, is painful and not generally entertaining.

In the West in modern times we call this “deep tissue work” or “soft tissue mobilization”. I usually use the latter term. In older times this might have been called “Lay Healing” but the technology for this was not developed seriously in the West because it was associated with Witchcraft and also because it competed with “medical” professions (occupied 100% by men). While the religious competition with the healing arts has subsided somewhat, the competition from “medicine” has only intensified, at least in the West.

“The medical field and the Church were in close contact throughout the 14th century. Since the church controlled medical schooling, they exclusively approved of certified male physicians, and not female healers. Thus, by the late 1500s, women were accused of witchcraft for successfully healing patients, simply because they did not adhere to the rules of the clergy (Lang). The church’s favoritism of male physicians also allowed doctors to accuse women who they saw as potential rivals in the field. Some historians theorize that it was these events that led to the gradual distrust of independent healer at large (Lang).”

In the West the few people qualified to do this generally do not because at the level of knowledge needed to be both safe and effective, those individuals will be paid more to do other types of medicine. Thus it can approach almost mythological status in the West as even at the PhD of Physical Therapy (PhD PT) level, many do not believe it exists as they won’t be trained in it in school.

At the time I was practicing this clinically, at the end of the 20th Century, the Loma Linda School of Physical Therapy (which operated at the PhD level) would send some of their students to me for their final clinical training. Those students would often be a bit alarmed that they were being asked to train under someone without a PhD, and even without a degree in PT. Until they saw me in action. More on this when I talk about a case study in the section “Ballerina” below. Again, these skills are still very rare in the West because they fall outside the normal Western view of medicine due to residual religious influence and “medical” competition.

In the East, there are different views. In Thailand the most prestigious temple complex in the country has a medical school and massage school. The latter was set up in 1955. I had the honor of visiting it but I was not there long enough to evaluate the program or its students. I would estimate that there are less than 1000 people in the world well qualified to do the sorts of work I describe in this paper, and a large proportion of them are likely to be in Thailand or trained there due to cultural and academic support for the technology and training.

Gender

This sort of work is unusual in that it requires a high degree of both empathy and manual strength. This is an unusual combination of prerequisites, as generally we associate empathy as being a female trait, and the manual strength of men is far greater than that of women on average. Thus 90 to 95% of the people who do massage work are women, but at the highest tier you see a much higher proportion of men.

I saw a similar situation when I was in nursing school since I gravitated to jobs where my high degree of empathy would be an advantage. There are a lot of activities in nursing that are dangerous for women to engage in (such as transfers of obese patients) but they are forced to do so regardless if a male nurse is not available. Male nurses are rare because they are under unusual scrutiny and have to perform at a much higher skill level than their female peers in order to complete nursing school. It’s also not culturally seen as “masculine”. Further, as I found out, if any sort of gender rivalry occurs, women are quick to purge men from opportunities where they have numerical superiority. Of course this exact situation occurs with women in male dominated fields, where in such cases the few women who manage to graduate would have to be of above average ability due to similar discrimination effects.

Long term this harms these same women, but most people are not good at thinking long term. I was in a 9 year relationship with one nurse who was “permanently” disabled for this very reason when I met her. I repaired her and she was able to work 100% functionally while I maintained her health in the relationship using my Touch skills.

As I explain how Touch works, understand that the fingertips can have as many as 300 nerve endings per square millimeter. That’s 30,000 per square centimeter. The elbow has ~0 tactile nerve endings per mm^2, and the forearm has ~2. Thus when a practitioner substitutes an elbow or forearm for their fingers to work on a patient, they are substituting body weight for strength because they lack the strength to do the Touch task. The practitioner is working almost blind due to lack of tactile sensory feedback and these parts of the body are also large and imprecise. Thus most women or smaller men who choose not to use their fingers can inflict harm to the patient if they attempt some of the more advanced techniques I’m about to describe.

With training, and fingertips, a well trained practitioner can feel small structures like nerves, arteries, or cords even when they are 10 or more cm beneath the skin and under multiple other muscles. If they have had proper education in dissection anatomy, they will be able to fully visualize what their fingers are telling them. This can be critical because some structures (like nerves) can be harmed if you rub them thinking you are rubbing a cord.

Understanding Muscle Injuries

Perhaps the most important thing to understand here is that in the West doctors rarely touch their patients and have limited skill sets to evaluate their patients manually. They may have had these skills generations ago but this has all been replaced by machines. Machines cannot do any of the things I’m going to describe in this paper.

A similar situation exists with physical therapists. They do have some experience and training with basic physical evaluation but generally don’t do it much in practice because they are not paid to do so. Automated methods of treatment pay just as well and take less time so physical therapists rarely take the one on one time necessary to do high level Touch. Thus it isn’t even a priority/possibility in their education unless the university has access to someone like me, which would be unusual since we are excluded from mainstream education (due to Misalignment).

When a muscle is strained or repeatedly fatigued, insult occurs. This is exactly what it sounds like. The muscle is like “I’ve had enough” and it will go into a sustained contraction (spasm) to protect itself from further insult. Over time all adjacent muscles will also be recruited into spasm to protect the original injury. Thus a complex web of interconnected injury develops over time with untreated or mistreated muscular injuries. As the technology to treat these injuries is typically not available in the West, or as in the case of physical therapy, are very expensive and of limited efficacy, these injuries often progress to “permanent” injuries over time, resulting in disability.

At approximately 30% of maximum contraction force for a muscle, this is enough to push blood out of the muscle and/or restrict adjacent blood vessels. An insulted muscle will maintain this situation indefinitely. The resulting blood flow restriction results in a lack of oxygen, the technical term for this is ischemia. Ischemia can happen anywhere in the body. If it happens in your brain, the result is a stroke. In the heart, a heart attack.

In muscles the result, beyond just spasm, is what I call cording. I taught physical medicine occupations for the State of California for six years, after my stint as the trainer for the UCLA and USA Olympic women’s track teams, so I created new terminology and teaching methods during this time. The muscle will get smaller over time but it will bunch up into cords, like strings on a violin. How “sharp” these strings are indicates the age of the cord.

Long term injury is treated as permanent by medicine in the West because they have no means to treat it. “Modalities” like TENS have very limited benefit. Patients will stop feeling the injury over time as the lack of blood flow can also lead to local neuropathy. They will feel increasing pain around the original injury as the insult web expands. Thus my patients will commonly come to me citing pain somewhere else, and be shocked when I identify the actual injury as being in a different part of their body. But they can tell it’s true because once I start restoring blood flow, the nerves wake up and they can feel where the greatest pain is coming from.

These injuries need not be permanent.

Treating Injuries With Touch

Friction against the cord, usually using a cross-fibre technique (just like playing a guitar), increases blood flow to the area. Cross-fibre means that the direction of friction is perpendicular to the direction of the cord. Movements should be short and concentrated, as a large movement will result in a “skin drag”. Moving the skin beyond it’s elastic limit causes a lot of damage to the connective tissue that holds your skin to your body, and this is visible as bruising.

Because the movements need to be short but strong, it can be applied through clothing. This is handy when I’ve needed to support elite athletes as I’m running to them where they stop like a human F1 pit crew. There could be 10,000 spectators watching whatever I do, so clothing needs to stay where it is.

The other reason that movements need to be short is that the target muscle could be under other muscles. A good example is the piriformis muscle. The sciatic nerve passes under it. It is not unusual for the piriformis to go into spasm with people who sit on it (in a chair) all day. The muscle can then tighten over the sciatic nerve, causing pain and disfunction from there to the foot (distally). The piriformis lies under the gluteus maximus and gluteus medius muscles, and these are large muscle groups. A high degree of precision is required to friction the piriformis without affecting the gluteals above it. This is possible because the direction of these muscles is different, so a cross-fibre movement will only affect the perpendicular muscle.

Sciatica from piriformis compression is very common. Because it doesn’t show up on various pictures and because doctors are not trained to evaluate it, it is often confused with lumbar/sacral vertebral foramen compression. The “medical” treatment for that is a barbaric surgery where the patient is filleted. Doctors and hospitals make a lot of money from such surgeries. This results in scar formation and cording along the fileted section of the spine if everything goes perfect. On a bad day, other structures (like nerves) can be damaged.

Thus it’s always wise to attempt less invasive therapies before moving to surgery, but doctors rarely refer “down” the “medical” food chain because this can lower their profitability.

[I put “medical” in quotes because since at least the 15th century the terms medical and medicinal have not meant the same thing, but are conflated when it benefits physicians. Medicinal is some substance or treatment that benefits health. Medical is something related to Aligned medical professions.]

When treating older injuries, I start from the outer radius of the insult web and slowly work towards the center. If I try to go straight to the center, adjacent reinforcement will prevent any reduction in spasm. Thus on a first treatment this might confuse the patient until they realize how this works.

Case Study: The Ballerina

I’ve worked on a very wide range of patients in my career, from incomplete quadriplegics to Olympic world record holders. I’ve even worked on a number of police officers even though they used to treat me disrespectfully in California. That stopped when they started having to get their yearly physical evaluations from me.

One case was especially remarkable for a number of reasons. I was training a number of Loma Linda PhD PT students in an aged care facility in the Palm Desert area. Due to weird laws, a patient there ran out of Medicare paid treatment sessions, and the law prevented her from getting further treatments, even if she wanted to pay out of pocket. This was an ~85 year old former Ballerina (very tall) who had fallen and broken her neck. She was in a halo-brace which has metal screws that go into the skull to hold the head steady while the cervical spine fuses back together.

I was asked to finish her therapy, which was only perhaps 20% complete at that time. The first thing I did was determine why she broke her neck in the first place. From her chart I identified that she had three different physicians, and two had prescribed drugs to lower her blood pressure and one proscribed a drug to raise her blood pressure. This is an easy way to confuse the smooth muscle in the arteries and dysregulate blood pressure. It seemed likely this caused the fainting spell that caused her to break her neck.

I contacted all of her doctors and firmly requested they remove the contradicting medications. Doctors don’t like being told what to do, even by other doctors. But they like getting sued even less.

While doing the traditional rehab required to maintain someone subjected to prolonged bed rest, and prevent pneumonia, I determined that she had a bigger problem than her broken neck: her hamstrings were too short. This was a result of not walking for months and not getting comprehensive rehab prior to my arrival. If a medical diagnosis identifies an area of injury, like the neck, generally therapy to the legs is not allowed or at least is not paid for by insurance.

Having been formally trained in ballet myself, I knew how disciplined this woman must be. I told her that if she wanted to walk again I would have to lengthen her hamstrings. I made it clear this would take months and be very painful. She consented though, understanding what she was consenting to. This injury was officially “permanent” and she was expected to never walk again. Even my PhD PT students considered what I was about to do as “impossible”.

But I worked on her daily for two months, using advanced Touch techniques along with advanced stretch techniques (such as proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, PNF) that are also painful. She got the same treatment as my Olympic athletes, though of course more gently.

When the day came, she got on her feet. No wheelchair, no walker. I put a gait belt on her as a precaution but she didn’t need it. She started walking down the halls of the facility, smiling and waving at the other residents like she had just won a beauty pageant. People thought they were looking at a ghost. No one was more surprised than my students. They knew what they were looking at was impossible. They never gave me a hard time again and perhaps would not be so quick to condemn their elderly patients during their careers.

Despite Loma Linda relying on my physical therapy expertise and trusting me with their top students, they would not allow me to even be a student there. The stated reason? I was not a vegetarian. This was in the 1990s and I would not become a vegetarian until 2009, and a vegan in 2012. This was one of many “non academic” reasons I was barred from graduate education throughout my career and the 10 years I studied at universities. Higher education in the USA is not merit based. Who gets access is determined by non academic criteria. This in turn determines who gets access to leadership positions in corporations and the government. It’s a very subtle but fine tuned and effective system.

In part two (159B) I will talk about the effect on society of the suppression of Touch in the West, why it happened, and what it is costing us.