Our patients ask many questions to try to understand what we are doing, what is going on in their body, why the pain appears, why is it always present in the same place.

I use all kinds of images and examples to popularize the work that is being done. As a patient it is important to understand the biopsychosocial mechanisms that are involved, and a good perception and visualization of the work allows him to more easily accept the information given.

But to understand the following, one must lay the basis for the functioning of the body, which underlies all bodily communication in all its aspects.

Let's take a look back at the early stages of evolution with the first multicellular organisms. These were subjected to their environment, dependent on variations in the conditions of the living environment, and in fact, subjected to premature death if the environment became less conducive to their development.

Evolution then allowed the establishment of a primitive nervous system in order to perceive the external environment. But this information is useless if it is not used! The second part of their evolution was the appearance of a neuro-motor mechanism to move the organism. But this motor response is correlated with external information, it is adapted and intelligent, in the sense that there is a variation of the response according to external information, and this automatically.

Why did this evolution take place, why the organism did not stay at the previous stage?

The driving force behind this development and the following ones is the need for the organism to prolong its balance over time, in other words to prolong its life.

Let's go back to today and explore our nervous system. We have powerful tools that allow us to explore the environment reliably; these are our 5 senses.

They allow us to have a precise reading of external reality, providing us with auditory, visual, taste, scent and tactile information. It is obvious that if we get our hands on a surface that is too hot we take it out as soon as we run away at the sight of a scene which is a danger to us ....

We therefore have a reaction adapted to our environment ... but unfortunately not all the time.

Who has not hit their head, their feet, who have not missed a step, who have not grasped an object badly, who have not sprained themselves, or have fallen ...

Usually we find all of this normal; certainly it is for a young child learning his proprioception and coordination, but later, this is no longer "normal" even if it is common.

What then happens in the nervous system so that there are these errors in the management of motor skills?

The anterior cingulate gyrus is a prefrontal cerebral area that allows you to project yourself into an action, and to direct your attention on the outside of our body, but also on the inside, which is called interoception.

The brain unconsciously receives a constant flow of data from our entire body to which it responds. For example, it is the proprioceptive mechanism which allows the brain to know the musculotendinous tissue tension and to send back motor information which may or may not contract the muscles in order to simply stay upright, for example. We thus have a specific body diagram which is a function of our postural tension diagram directly induced by our tensions and memories. We know that not all people have the same posture and this is a direct consequence of the emotional pattern.

Regarding our coordination management errors, if our attention is focused on our memories and memories, we activate the internal tension corresponding to this memory, which brings new interoceptive information to the nervous system which is no longer in correlation with the situation in which the body finds itself ... We can perform a certain point of the tasks automatically without being disturbed in our coordination, but if the load of interoceptive information dominates, then the nervous system is no longer able to respond correctly environmental information. It will then respond to the active internal information, which desynchronizes the motor response linked to the action in progress; we are then stuck in the march, we have a weakness of tone during our support, we judge (wrongly) the merits of an action which leads us to injure ourselves ... the examples are endless.

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To understand it you have to explore the 6th sense. 

All as much as we are we perceive, whether we like it or not, our environment and our congeners in a finer and more unconscious way than the 5 other senses. We know when our friend or relative is not well, we find it pleasant or not a place that we discover for the first time. So yes, certain visual signs give information, but this is correlated with a sensation, an internal feeling which corresponds to information emitted by the other or the environment.

It also comes into play mirror neurons which perform and mimic the person in front of us but without performing the movements. This allows us to understand the gestures and mimics of the other because our unconscious simulates them and makes them correspond to our own patterns.

Nevertheless, I suggest that the sensation generated by the presence of the other is preponderant in the mechanisms of visual analysis for example, since we can feel them even before having seen the person. 2 common examples support this version. The first is the reaction of dogs or cats who sense the arrival of their owner 5 to 10 minutes before their arrival at home. Animals show joy and excitement about feeling their owner come home.

The second is the reaction of a twin, no matter how far away from his brother or sister, when the latter experiences something important and stressful. Often it is said that the twin knows that his other twin has been through something just as it happens.

There is therefore an unconscious communication between us, independent of the 5 common senses. I will explain the mechanisms underlying this circulation of information later.

Let's take a step back, during our studies, with the study of ankle sprain (for us osteopaths). Mechanically speaking, we understand and feel in our hands the tensions that are at play; from a neurological point of view, it is a maintenance of tissue and muscle tension by the Gamma loop, a nerve impulse generated by the corresponding medullary stage bypassing the brain.

But if it is enough to deprogram this gamma loop using TGO, functional Johns or even structural techniques, why then are there residual tensions and pain after the session. Often in my practice I see pain and discomfort following sprains that occurred several months previously and have already been treated by other therapists. Even if the work that has been done is completely consistent and well done, it should be understood that the information of the sprain (not the simple little stretch) has been somatized elsewhere in the body; it is she who keeps the whole system blocked. 

The brain then remains on the sensation that appeared during the trauma. 

Thus, the related proprioception information is not what it should be because the gamma loop alters the tone of the leg muscles. This initially induces a modification of the support, therefore of the center of gravity and the adaptation by efferent response of the brain of a whole myofascial chain throughout the body.

In parallel to this phenomenon, we have the presence of this somatization which, in addition to locking the brain on this trauma, it also creates a tissue tension which will adapt in the body.

You have to visualize a somatization as a kind of knot or black hole ... yes! It attracts all peripheral tissues to it in all planes of space and creates another postural adaptation in parallel with that generated at the level of the foot.

So we end up with a double adaptive postural scheme that is both independent and also dependent since somatization maintains the whole system.

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During a local treatment of the foot, we notice in our tests that we must then go up a so-called ascending chain of adaptation. But where should we stop? Because if we stay in a joint reading, the pelvis often remains the limit of treatment, but if we pass a tissue (liquid, fascial), we find other higher adaptations which generally end on a viscus which is quite complex to release entirely. The higher the work will be on this chain, the more efficient the patient's response will be. But for all that there will remain residual tensions which will lead to a return of the initial pattern and possibly a maintenance of pain and discomfort.

Take a simple picture; if we want to turn off the light, we do not remove the bulb but press the switch; it is the same for the body, we must act upstream and not downstream. If we process the information at its base, ie where everything is maintained, then we will have a response from the entire system, both neurologically, locally, as well as functionally, hormonal, vascular, posture. ..

The keeper of this information is the same who processes all interoceptive information, namely the limbic system. It is he who is in charge of managing emotions and behaviors. It is thanks to him that we assign positive or negative values to events, that we memorize these same memories or that we delete superfluous information.

But how then to access this information? It is well recorded in different brain structures and the neural scale does not allow us to stimulate a few neurons in the center of the brain ...

If we were to take the mapped out path. If we were to stimulate the same regions as those involved in the birth of emotions!  

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When the stress load experienced by the brain is too great, an emotional memory arises in the body. This is what I cited above as being somatization. At the same time, the traumatic memory of the event is programmed in the nervous system; this is called the state of shock. So it can be relatively minor (sports trauma, minor accident) but can be much more traumatic (rape, post-traumatic stress of war, major trauma, coma ...).

Once this memory does not bend, it will dominate the conscious reasoning, bringing back the sensation experienced in the back office. The latter will then be transposed on a daily basis. Thus a dog who has bitten us prevents us from approaching other dogs, an accident prevents us from taking the car, anger that does not fall against the companion ...

So of course the nervous system provides solutions in order to continue to live properly but these are only compensations, and not a real liberation, which worsens the load of information to be managed by the nervous system and weakens the body by local modification of the terrain.

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Let's come back to deprogramming. These somatizations are palpable in the tissue since they cause a local vascular modification which loads the density of the area compared to the surrounding environment.

The therapist's job is then to stimulate them tissue in order to reactivate the corresponding brain memory pattern. This is not enough to release the information since the brain simply relives the stress but in a different space-time. This is our example of the fear of a dog following a child bite. Nothing changes and the next dog will have the same effect.

The nervous system must then be cut off from the notion of space and time in order to allow it to really relive only the event being processed. This is done by stimulating two areas of the brain, again thanks to the visceral areas.

Once these techniques have been carried out, we then observe a relaxation of the body, both muscular and vascular, with a feeling of heaviness of the body on the table. It is the vagus nerve that releases stimulation to arterial muscles and thus increases vascular supply through vasodilation.

We see a response of great interest here since the more a tissue is vascularized, the more it is oxygenated, the more flexible and in acid-base balance. This is the very definition of the state of health.

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Once this information is reintegrated, the entire coping mechanism undoes itself. Then of course the therapist will accompany this work to facilitate the return to balance.

The patient will then be able to resume the course of his life without being influenced by his memory.

The first interest is of course to release pain or discomfort; the second is much broader in terms of impact. Indeed, if we waste less energy compensating for these tensions, repeating errors of coordination or judgment, if we waste less time having to repair these errors; we save time and energy for the things that are really important, ie prolonging one's health balance over time, i.e. prolonging one's life ...

It is absolutely stupid to go through Paris to go to Rome from Marseille ... Yet this is what the brain blocked in its diagrams pushes us to do.

If there is a real interest or pleasure in taking this detour, then it will become intelligent, in the sense of emotional intelligence. This is what allows us to adapt intelligently and quickly to external situations, in accordance with who we are intrinsically and the situation proposed. In other words, it is about intuition, the best relationship between the environment and our diagram, without the need to think and analyze, just like our multicellular organism that I told you about at the beginning. 

So we see that the attention of the system to its environment is essential to maintaining the balance of the body in all these aspects. Constantly focusing one's attention on an imaginary, internal sensations, memories is a source of additional stress on the brain which cannot handle the rest of the incoming information correctly, a bit as if 3 or 4 people are talking to you at the same time, you don't listen to any more. The brain then defeats systems; memory, proprioception, balance (dizziness), physiology, emotion, relationships ...

We therefore see all the interest we have in working through this approach. The ease of access to active information, the ease to release it definitively, the positive impact on the whole body.

If life is a hike with a backpack or the more we move forward and we get older, and the more the slope straightens, and or the more we experience stress, the more stones we put in this bag; it seems logical to empty this bag before attacking the steep slope in order to have enough energy to go further in good health.