Sunday, July 01, 2007

Autonomics in skin

I have been thinking a lot about that last post, about sensory fibres behaving like two way streets, able to operate as autonomic motor (E-ffector, output) fibres as well as sensory (A-ffector, exteroceptive input) fibres.

I really, truly think this is a key piece for us as PT manual therapists.
I really, truly think this is a key piece of info that has been until now (pick one or more from following list):

1. never learned properly or explicitly
2. never understood within a frame of how touch can lead to physiological changes
3. bypassed as "too hard" or insignificant
4. not taught
5. taught but not emphasized
6. never linked to anything manual, never linked to any manual technique class
7. never taken seriously by our profession, or else our "as-if" capacity was never permitted awareness of even the slightest possibility that something like this could be remotely true
8. unavailable to a profession that prides itself on being science-based because it has only recently been verified/verifiable.
9. not allowed to inform our treatment constructs

There are probably more ramifications/ extrapolations I haven't thought of yet to put on this list. But for now, I'm just living with this info as if it were a new lens through which to view the entire world of manual therapy.
Mind-boggling to me, the infinity of how this little piece of basic info could change everything about everything... provided we were to let it sink all the way in.

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