Your hearing more these days about the new MIRACLE in medicine. The big talk is “Stem
Cells” right!? Everyone is talking about it like it is the easiest cure for almost anything that is
plaguing the human body. But, as usual, the truth is a bit more abstract. Stem cells aren’t the
cure for everything and, in fact, we have to be careful what we put into the body.
One of my favorite things to say is that healing is a process of dealing with IRRITATION. If
we’re sick, it is usually because our body has been invaded by a pathogen like a bacterium, virus,
or fungi. So, we have special cells that recognized this and put a call into our defense forces.
These defense forces replicate and conscript other cells into the fight and, if we’re relatively
healthy, we win the war on the pathogen.
When it comes to injury, we have two basic types; trauma (T) and repetitive stress (RS). T is
pretty self explanatory; car crashes, falls, sports injury, etc. RS is also pretty self explanatory;
over use at work, repeated athletic activities like biking or lifting weights or running miles and
miles. Everything will have consequence and the body will have to heal itself. It does so by
responding to the IRRITATION. Injury hurts cells, they release chemical messengers, those
messengers are sensed by the same special cells that call in the defensive forces and, viola!, you
have an effort by the cells of your body to clean up and repair the injury. It’s quite beautiful,
actually.
So, in my work with Fascial Manipulation (which might be better called “Force Vector
Correction”) I often tell my patients that this is targeted micro trauma with the specific purpose of
creating IRRITATION. I do this so that we can call the defensive forces into the specific areas
that are causing the problem. It’s like the generals looking over the battle field and building a
strategic plan to place the battles where they’ll do the most good. After all, you don’t want to
waste time and energy doing things that are not necessary or, worse, cause more problems.
So, keep this concept in mind when you see advertisements about Regenerative Medicine and
anything to do with Stem Cell Derivative Therapy. It’s basically IRRITATION therapy. We’re targeting an
area and inducing a physiological change but it has to be done strategically or you’ll be wasting
money and time or, potentially, making things worse. We’ll explore this more in Part 2, so keep
an eye out for the next blog post!
It’s absolutely something to think about!
Written By Dr. Edward Traum of 3D Integrated Medical.