Awareness Heals

A patient came in complaining of pain in her left foot, stemming from a tear in posterior tibial tendon in 2014.

Rounds and rounds of Physical Therapy and lots of chiropractic visits (including some very specific extra-spinal manipulations to the bones surrounding her left knee and foot) and still she was experiencing the same hypersensitivity and only mild improvement. In fact when the patient visited her Primary Physician who had ordered an MRI; he told her that her pain sensitivity and reaction was way out of line to the amount of pressure he was using whilst examining her and recommended Lyrica to calm her Nervous System down.

I recommended we try 6 visits of dedicated Feldenkrais lessons/sessions. What we discovered was that while she was lying facing up, her left hip wasn’t being accessed by the movements of rolling her left foot.

Subsequent exploration revealed a torquing of her femur and tibia. In other words, the bone of her upper leg (femur) was not communicating with the bone of her lower leg (tibia), in a coordinated way. This resulted in an impingement at the crossroads (the knee joint) which wasn’t allowing any movement through.

By bringing awareness to her hip and leg as I moved her, a gradual change and release started to occur. Further exploration revealed an unconscious clenching of her left buttocks muscle which she was unaware of doing. By paying careful attention to her hip as I everted her left foot (lifted the outside edge of her foot), her hip started to differentiate from her pelvis and the ease of movement of her hip increased.

Even though she had manipulation to all of the above places prior to today’s visit, by bringing Awareness to what she was doing allowed for less pain and greater range of motion. Awareness in the form of active learning by the Brain, much like learning to play the piano or ride a bicycle, is the difference.