Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1256819
82 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 2 0 even more than osteopathy's founder Andrew Taylor Still—was that fascia is the most important and most powerful tissue as a focus for the attention of the myofascial therapist for bodywork, rather than the skin, or the muscles, or the lymphatic flow, or anything else. And now I have been very involved in research, and I've been together with researcher and Rolfer Tom Findlay and others. Fascia research has taken a big prime-time development in scientific research, and Rolfing is profiting from that. TL: Yes, that's right. I mentioned Peter Melchior, but to be fair, at that time he also said, "He's the kind of guy I want on the faculty. I want him there. I want him helping us think these things through." TALKING TO FASCIA, CHANGING THE BRAIN RS: I published a paper called "Talking to Fascia, Changing the Brain" in the late '90s.1 I wrote to all the faculty members and [asked], "What is your response?" to the little experiments I had done in Australia, where I tried to Rolf people under anesthesia [and] discovered something that should not be possible based on the Rolfing model. So, I questioned my colleagues. Peter Melchior and one other person were the only positive responses to that. TL: What did you discover that shouldn't be possible? RS: The first thing was the range of motion restriction in the shoulder joint. In many people, if they lie on their back and you put the upper arm next to the ear in a straight upward direction—say, in a flexible dancer—you can extend or elevate the arm all the way to 180 degrees, so that the upper arm is next to the ear. But with many more restricted people, the arm is hanging there in the air. So if you check whether the muscles are relaxed with a little wobble, and if you think they are relaxed but the arm still is in the air, then our model was, since it's not the muscles, then it's the fascia that's stiff. I only had three patients at that time; I should have better prepared. I would have done the range of motion test and would have used a force meter, so that I always used the same force to pull, et cetera. In the three clients: One had no restriction—at least not to 180 degrees. In two of them, the arm was hanging in the air before the anesthesia in a way where I would have thought it was not muscular restriction, because if you wobble the arm, there was no visible muscle restriction. But as soon as the anesthesia kicked in, the arm dropped all the way to the Shoulder range of motion can increase dramatically under anesthesia, which suggested to Dr. Schleip that at least "some component of a chronic movement restriction" is not related to fascial properties.