Sea waves = Ectoderm

[Diane]

From the Postural Restoration thread;
1. The living conscious human organism is an ocean of surface and all that is under that surface, currents and live creatures.

2. The mesodermal treatment systems are like docks and piers out into it. These docks and piers are expensive real estate, with lots of "shops" set up, gates to access to view the water or dangle feet into it, learn about sailing or diving, to rent little boats or jetskis or diving suits to go have a look, protected by life jackets and oxygen tanks, very artificial, very protective and protected, expensive to acquire; lots of rules and regs surrounding useage. Never really getting the "feel" of the ocean or encountering it on its own terms.

3. The medical profession has fleets of ships for getting around on it, or for submarining. They hardly ever get wet.

4. By contrast, ectodermal therapists simply wade out from shore. The beach slopes right down into the sea, and ectodermal therapists will have explored all the areas, know where the sharp rocks are, the riptides, where the sharks usually are to be found, the octopi, the sting rays, the sand bars, the islands.. coral reefs, small bits of dazzling beauty, wafting seaweed..

Ectodermal therapists will get the "feel" of ocean against their own bodies/hands. They will know the cold and warm currents, the nibbles of the curious fish. They will be adapted to taking long deep breaths and staying under for prolonged periods of time, looking for pearls of pain relief. Generally they will stay away from the noisy bustle of the docks in favor of the quiet tidal pools where way more real action, real life can be found.

And ectodermal therapists have adapted to swimming long distances in open ocean. Embryology and evolution can give one flippers and water wings to make the swimming more efficient. Occasionally one bumps into other creatures out there who, while they can swim quite well, don't care to learn much about the ocean (pseudoscience therapists of various stripes). Of course, one finds many of those up on the docks and piers too, colonizing it even, squawking loudly and fighting over scraps, or living just beneath, interested in blood sucking only.

Other thoughts;
1. the ocean/neuromatrix inside the therapist and the ocean/neuromatrix inside the patient have their own ways of communicating through kinesthesia, and can likely make use of mirror neurons, if the visual cortex gets involved through imagery.

2. a sailing metaphor can be applied.. small boat, close to the water, the "feel" not just of the ocean of the patient but the winds they cope with.

[nari]

Another analogy/simile is the kayak experience, which I discovered on Vancouver Island's west coast - tiny freeboard, bottom visible, absolute silence, picking up bull kelp and drifting amongst seals. No way can this be experienced in a power boat or larger craft. Those in larger boats miss the nuances.

Nari

[Diane]

Kayaking, definitely. Canoes too.
I want to add something about pirate ships ripping off peoples' ideas about their minds and health, or else reinforcing their illusions/perceptual fantasies/conceptual hallucinations too, at some point. Meanwhile, I love this fiction passage by a Newfoundland short story writer, Michael Winter:
He says, slowly, that there is an island in Grand Lake called Glover Island. And Glover is the largest island on the island of Newfoundland. And on Glover there is a pond. And on that pond there is a smaller island. I want, he says, to paddle up Grand Lake and portage over Glover Island. Get to that pond and cross to the island and spend a night. He says there's only one other island in the world with a lake holding an island, and a pond on that island with an island in that pond, and that place is Sumatra. And if you took a globe and put a finger on Newfoundland and anoter finger on Sumatra you'd see they're pretty much on opposite sides of the earth.

I love the idea of nested ectoderm, the skin being the outside big water, the province being the input, the lake being the spinal cord, the little island being the brain, and the little pond being the motor changes, the little island in the pond the actual changed output/pain relief. You have to keep going and spend long enough on the process to get the change.

[Barrett Dorko]

In Songs for Coming Home, David Whyte wrote a series of seven poems describing his thoughts while kayaking in the Pacific Northwest. I thought of this while reading Diane and Nari’s exchange so I went and go the book and chose just a few lines that I felt connected to this subject of handling and navigation. I tell my students, “The patient is an ocean and you’re an ocean-going bird. Don’t try to dive in – land on the surface, go where it goes.”

From “Songs From The Kayak”

In the sea for each paddle stirring the waters
There are tones of color
There is the horizon…the short slapping waves
Splash colors as the thin skin
Leaps forward

I lean over…moving intently…a sense of journey

When the mind lets go at last
The kayak can roll with the waves

In my voice
I hear the old one waking at last…his body is hardened by cold

The kayak pulls round
And the spark behind fear
Recognized as life
Leaps into flame

Always this energy smolders inside
When it remains unlit
The body fills with dense smoke

Me again. I see "the dense smoke" as the creative movement (ideomotion) unrequited - unexpressed. It's literally isometric activity and almost always misinterpreted as a defect and not the defense that it is.

[nari]

Barrett,

Exactly. During the first hour of my new efforts of kayaking, there was isometric activity all over me. I didn't go with the kayak, I was too conscious of doing 'the right thing' with the long horizontal paddle, or whatever it's called. When I stopped fussing about the 'right way', we were out in the mouth of the Sound and it was getting choppy..and somehow I then forgot about conscious control and just went with the flow. Easy.
I then went on to complete about 24 km, and apart from an overworked (R) arm, I felt that kayaking was the greatest activity ever. Fortunately I had a good instructor who knew the knack of just going with the flow.

PTs are similar - we are too aware of 'doing the right thing' according to all that highly consciousness-induced training we are imbued with: posture, symmetry, muscle and stability. The brain never gets a look in.

Nari

[Diane]

Love the dense smoke image. Frustrated movement, dampened flame. Oceany fire, firey ocean..
Love that image of being an ocean going bird too.
All that tension about doing the right thing, deer in the headlights type of mental freezing, can't be good... Nari, my mom used to say (learning a new motor skill and triumphant, half-kidding) "It's all in how you hold your mouth."

I found this line in a book of essays by Mary Oliver; "It is the intimate, never the general, that is teacherly. The idea of love is not love. The idea of the ocean is neither salt nor sand; the face of the seal cannot rise from the idea to stare at you, to astound your heart."

[Diane]

Women have more sensory nerves than men do (http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/tb/2017). Surprise surprise.
It makes me smile a bit. What are they actually measuring? They appear to have been measuring numbers of sensory receptors per unit area. That doesn't in and of itself "prove" that women have more than men do, it might just fritter away to nothing when total skin surface /differential size of surface area ratios are considered. If we think of the relative size of babies/adults.. surely babies would have their receptors "closer together" and as they grow the space between the receptors would enlarge. Maybe on women the receptors are just closer together.

[Diane]

In my own wee world, one of the things I'm missing is a real good source of corroboration of some ideas I think are important, like differentiated sensitivity of various peripheral nerves. My idea is that the motor branches and sensory branches are differently sensitive. I.e., the brain, while it may be equally alert to both, will produce "pain" from irritation of one more than the other. M and S branches differ not so much categorically (because both kinds carry both kinds of fibres), but differ in proportionality and number of actual afferents/efferents of both ordinary and autonomic fibres.

It seems to me (i.e., my prediction is) that
1. the closer a branch comes to the skin,
2. the sooner it has branched off the main trunk,
3. the longer it has to travel under the skin to get to its "receptive field",
4. the more autonomic fibres it has to drag along, because of how much blood flow there is to skin...

...the MORE SENSITIVE it will be, or rather the more sensitive the brain will be TO it.

Cutaneous nerves don't only have to pick up info, they have to motorically innervate the capillary beds in skin to cool down the whole organism.

To me there is something important here that pain science hasn't bothered trying to figure out yet, let alone PT.. That is, what is the sort of nervi nervorum input from cutaneous as opposed to motor branches of nerves, given the same circumstances of hypoxia (chemoreceptors alerted) or lack of movement (mechanoreceptors not firing in proper array) with subsequent build up of biochemical irritants (chemoreceptors alerted another way, different firing array perhaps..) If they are indeed different. My work with patients tells me they are. But I want to know, not merely guess or have a theory or a hunch.

Too many questions, too little time.

[Diane]

I think I didn't explain myself as precisely as I thought I did.

It seems to me (i.e., my prediction is) that
1. the closer a branch comes to the skin,
2. the sooner it has branched off the main trunk,
3. the longer it has to travel under the skin to get to its "receptive field",
4. the more autonomic fibres it has to drag along, because of how much blood flow there is to skin...
This part was OK..
But this part isn't exactly what I wanted to say:

...the MORE SENSITIVE it will be, or rather the more sensitive the brain will be TO it.
Rather than saying "the more sensitive the brain is to it" I want to say, the more the brain builds up a pain story as an output to alert the conscious awareness/sense of self part.

I think it makes sense evolutionarily, i.e. the nonconsciousness parts of the brain want to make the conscious awareness part of the brain take an action or let it (nonconscious) take an action, get the cougar off its organism, stop inhibiting the organism from running away, moving, whatever.

I think the brain/CNS is sensitive to all of it, and deals with it however it can, i.e. noise from the PNS, but I think it feels more threatened or helpless about hurt or hypoxia being done to the more cutaneous/sensory as opposed to the deeper/more motor nerves. But I've got no proof, just tantilizing suggestions from the Tunnel Syndrome book, and another chapter I found online in a work rehab book, downloadable. Argh. Guess I'll have to bite a bullet and get my hands on the articles referenced in the tunnel syndrome book and see if I can find the trail.

[Diane]

From the thread Back Muscles: Which ones? (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2045) 1. All nerves are "sensitive"
2. All large branches anywhere are subserved by nervi nervorum/vasa nervorum that are "sensitive"
3. Mechanoreceptors/thermoreceptors/chemoreceptors (i.e., nocioceptors) are everywhere, in all tissue
4. The only ongoing peripheral "reception" we can really tune into with our conscious awareness is from skin and from our kinesthetic senses
5. Any nerve anywhere can sensed by the brain as being oxygen deprived and therefore in trouble
6. The brain will leap into protection mode for a nerve ahead of any other tissue, and ahead of any real damage
7. The nervous system (in its entirety, brain, spinal cord, all the PNS) accounts for only 3% of body mass, but uses 20% of all the oxygen taken in with each breath (i.e., high maintenance)
8. Because the body is comprised of layers, nerves have to "shoelace" their way through different layers where they can get hung up/stretched/strangled/ or otherwise their circulation compromised slightly
9. Because the nervous system is functionally fractal, and because the PNS is three-dimensionally branched, pain "from" (mechanical deformation) anywhere in one branch can be "felt" anywhere along that branch, upstream or downstream, or in any geographical region served by that nerve or any of its twigs.
10. That fractality has been both our biggest source of confusion and yet, is also our biggest advantage. We can make the whole nerve happy if we can just noodle the body container around it enough to make the cranky bit happy. We can pull on it gently and longitudinally (Shacklock/Butler) or we can affect it by bowing it, rolling it, wringing it slightly, spiraling it, stetching its receptive field (what the MFRers do and everyone else does and don't realize they do.)
11. The body wall (even the ribcage) is so distortable that squishing it a bit will immediately fire all the mechanoreceptors everywhere, and you've got manual therapy. Add lots of time and gentleness and some deep breathing so that the body wall gets used /nerves get tugged from the inside as well, and you've got body work. Speed it up and put in a ballistic force to perhaps produce an audible noise from somewhere inside and you've got mobilipulation.
12. The nerves don't distort or stretch by much but the containers/tunnels do. Most bodily physical construction is on the diagonal and/or spiral to add maximal strength with minimal material
13. The body is mostly made from fascia. Fascia doesn't really lengthen either, but it will bend a bit if shortened (a better deal than attempting to lengthen it) and masses of nervous tissue within it and everywhere in the vicinity will be refreshed/oxygenated. The body is flexible to the extent it doesn't have fascia, and because there are lots of built-in "grommet" holes so that neurovascular structures can shoelace through it (Like a string of paper dolls are stretchier than the paper they are made from, because of all the holes.)
14. A nerve supplying a joint will supply all the muscles that move that joint and all the skin over it. If you can get on any bit of skin that logically is a dermatome for some cranky nerve bit deeper in or further upstream, theoretically you can affect that nerve for the better, help some oxygen get to it.

Have I left anything out? I think all the above is true. If anyone has any reason to think otherwise, or can point out a factual error please please do so, and we can get into the points and find references.

[Diane]

I've been turning the mesodermalistic versus the ectodermalistic perspective over and around and upsidedown in my head for a number of years now. Comparing, contrasting, arguing, defining, always trying to understand more, always trying to relate back to basic science of embryology and evolution. I've no doubt bored many to tears with this private obsession gone public.

Here's one more thought:

Mesodermal thinkers take a superficial approach to something too deep for them to really get their actual hands on, e.g., the spine.

Ectodermal thinkers take a deep approach to something everyone easily gets their hands on, i.e., skin... including skin over the tips of the spinal processes.

Have I left anything out?

[Jon Newman]

Hi Diane,

Thanks for the invitation for feedback. I perhaps read too much into your point number four. Could you clarify what you mean by "peripheral 'reception'"? I'm concerned about where other felt senses such as hunger, thirst, pain, etc would fit into this model.

Thanks

[Diane]

Jon, I wasn't including special senses or intrinsic organismic senses such as thirst. Only sensation from outside through skin, as opposed to from "joint" or "muscle"..

But you're quite right, I should have been more specific.
Afterall, ectoderm will get its info anyway it can, even dream it up.

[nari]

Diane,

Chronic/persistent pain is characteristically non-dermatomal, but can be very specifically nondermatomal, say, just in one limb while the major site for pain experience can be a way off, even contralateral. Given that central sensitisation has occurred, can you figure why this would be so?

An example (there are many) is a patient with anterior, lateral and posterior thigh pain of months duration, from inguinal to knee, yet the most severe pain is in the contralateral shoulder. The shoulder responded to neurodynamics quite rapidly (the diagnosis was "torn RC"...of course :confused: ) and about a week later the pain in the thigh slowly resolved. I have thought about this and figured that there may have been an issue with the spine but could not find a reasonable hypothesis.

BTW, the thigh had several indications of central sensitisation.

Nari