By Gavin Buehler
Our approach to treatment is simple. Restore an overall balance to the body for optimal healing, performance, and wellness. Everything is connected. If there is a disruption anywhere, everything will be affected to some degree.
But how do we go about starting to rebalance a body?
One of the most important concepts that we keep in mind that helps us troubleshoot and determine where to start or what to work on is Fluid Dynamics. This is something I believe to be highly overlooked but has a tremendous impact and can often explain some of the woo-woo effects in the body.
We generally perceive ourselves as a form of solid or semi-solid mass and we’ve traditionally treated our body structure as such. We tend to think of the solids in our body first, and then everything else is built around them. However, for the
most part we are sacks of fluid containing solids. More like a colloidal suspension (fluid with solid particles floating or suspended within).
Adult bodies are roughly 55-60% water and all the structures within our body that we view as more or less solid, such as bone, require high percentages of water as well. The solids are really more so suspended in the fluid and fascial webbing creating a structure of tensegrity.
What do you mean by tensegrity?
A tent is an example of a tensegral structure. You’ve got solid poles connected by flexible fabric, and under a balanced tension they hold a structure. In the human body the bones are like the tent poles, the fascia and other soft tissues can be thought of as the fabric, and water fills in the spaces creating tension within our sack that can hold a form. Keeping this fluid balanced around the structures within our sack is key for holding the optimal shape of our form, flow and health of everything.
Why should we give heavy consideration to fluid?
Besides the fact that it is the most abundant substance making up more than half of the human body, it is also the densest. While all the other structures have some sort of give to them (they can compress or bend), water is incompressible. This means it needs to occupy the right spaces within the body to maintain a fluid balance. If too much fluid builds in one area, it creates pressure and other things need to compensate since water cannot.
Injuries can cause our structures and fabric to become altered or distorted making it more difficult for fluid to occupy the appropriate spaces, building pressure elsewhere that can result in discomfort. This might explain why sometimes the sight of an injury might feel okay, but somewhere else hurts. If fluid can’t circulate through the injury site anymore, it needs to find space elsewhere since it can’t compensate.
After an impact injury, we sometimes see or find other injuries on the other side of the body or along the pathway that the force of impact was driven. The point of impact disrupts the fluid creating a wave. That wave will travel through the body disrupting other structures in its path and if the impact is hard enough, could hit the opposite side of our closed sack creating damage there. When you throw a rock into water, the water is displaced and ripples form. If the body of water is large enough, those ripples can slowly dissipate. Our human body is enclosed, so there is only so much space for that energy to dissolve.
When we work on a body, we find areas where fluidity is disrupted and do our best restore that fluidity via the manual manipulation tools we have at our disposal. Clearing up the disruption alleviates tension and pressure helping to restore balance and flow of circulation, nutrients and energies that promote optimal health.
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