Blog

Metal in the mouth upsets essential reflexes and makes people weak

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:11:00 GMT

Below are a couple of videos showing how people are affected by metal irritation in the mouth. They are from the chiropractor Simon King. I studied with him 4 or 5 years ago before he moved to Australia. I consistently find that people with long term, hard to fix issues have metal in their mouth. The worst offenders are silver fillings, gold crowns and tongue and lip piercings. Sometimes porcelain over metal crowns, infrequently titanium posts.

One simple way of understanding what is happening is to think of standing on a pebble. Your whole body will contract away from the irritant. Imagine walking around on a pebble every day - your musculoskeletal system gets in to chronic adaptation patterns where some muscles are over-contracted and some are switched off. In the videos the people cannot lift the weights due to weak, switched off muscles. Weakness is what I look for when I test muscles. It is a reliable, early indicator of problems. Fix the weakness, by removing the irritant and the problem, often pain, goes away.

When you take away the irritant, the pebble in the shoe, the whole body is controlled differently. We can mimic removing the pebble from the shoe. Think of a child in pain - if you rub vigorously over the pain, the pain will go away. Technically, fast nerve fibre stimulation from the rubbing will inhibit the slow fibre pain signal (this is pain gate theory). By pressing on an irritating tooth or pressing a bone that is out of line we override the irritation and the nervous system will control the body differently. Muscles that were switched off will switch on, straight away.

Here are two links to two more great videos from Simon King on metal in the mouth causing weakness and pain.

http://proprioception.org.uk/unnecessary-pain-and-injury/

http://proprioception.org.uk/raving-fans/

You can also find out more from Simon King's book 'Live Without Pain'

New look site and update on my practice

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:42:00 GMT

Welcome to my new improved site! It looks pretty much like the old one, but this blog page is new and the back ground features are much sharper. I will be adding articles and things that interest me every so often. Let me know if there is anything about cranial or chiropractic that you would like to hear about.

I am registered as a chiropractor in the UK. I still use skills I learnt as chiropractor to treat and diagnose, but most of my treatments are biodynamic craniosacral therapy. I treat in London once a month and Geneva on average two weeks a month (a treatment room in Geneva and my first ever brass plaque, also from Geneva, are shown above). The rest of my time I feel lucky to teach cranial work and, increasingly, TRE. Teaching cranial work has taken me all over the world in the last few years. Currently I am involved in courses in Vancouver, Ireland, Switzerland and hopefully getting a course going in Oslo - see www.bodyintelligence.com. I also blog on cranial work at www.cranialintelligence.com.

TRE - tension and trauma releasing exercises - has been a really exciting discovery. For my TRE related activity go to www.trelondon.com. TRE is a wonderful self regulating tool to help recovery from overwhelming events or just to ease chronic tension patterns. I run a TRE group in North London once a month.

I look forward to working with you

cheers Steve

Dissociation and the Body

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:28:00 GMT

What is dissociation?

"I heard a shout; starting and looking half around I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me ... Growling horribly close to my ear he shook me as a terrier does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of panic or feeling of terror, though I was quite conscious of all that was happening ... This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora; and if so is a merciful provision by our benevolent creator for lessening the pain of death."

- The explorer David Livingstone, writing in 1857

The purpose of the attached paper is to discuss the relationship between dissociation and bodywork. Some degree of dissociation is very common in people with musculoskeletal complaints: a significant proportion of my work with clients involves negotiation around dissociative states. There is a continuum of responses from feeling slightly numb in one part of the body when focusing on body sensations to feeling completely detached and outside of the body as a basic state. The paper discusses research from psychiatry, body psychotherapy approaches, the physiology of pain, polyvagal theory and the neurology of connective tissue. The main aim is to explain how trauma can cause overwhelm in the autonomic nervous system and to show how this impacts the musculoskeletal system.

You can download full article at this link: Dissociation v8

A version of this article appeared in The Fulcrum Jan 2008. The Fulcrum is the journal of the CSTA, see www.craniosacral.co.uk

Quotes from the article:

‘Dissociation is very common in people with musculoskeletal complaints.’

‘The essential feature of dissociation is a disruption of the normal integrative functions of consciousness, memory, identity, and perception of the environment.’

‘We have very primitive responses in the presence of any threat to our integrity.’

‘There are clear somatic consequences to dissociation which can be present subclinically.’

‘Trauma is anything that overwhelms our resources.’