Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Mechanical deformation of a peripheral neural structure

Here is a slide I made based on an image in an old, out-of-print but nevertheless extremely valuable Lundborg book, Nerve Injury and Repair. I see there is an online version

Anyway, this slide depicts what happens to the intraneural microcirculation system during mechanical deformation. Imagine the area labelled "ligature" not as a ligature, but rather as a grommet hole in fascia. Then imagine the neural structure being pulled away from the grommet hole, to which it is circumferentially attached, either:

1. into the body, by some unconscious muscular force generated in the spinal cord perhaps, way below conscious awareness, pulling it sideways, because it's trying to alleviate the irritation arising in some other part of the 72 kilometer long fuzzball known as the peripheral nervous system, and unintentionally saws away, instead, on this new piece of the fuzzball, and on its microcirculation; or..


2. outside the body, by some kind of unrelieved static skin layer contact/fixation against/with the external world, e.g., bottoms of feet on concrete or butt against chair seat, or elbow on arm rest or hand on mouse, while the rest of the body moves inside itself. 






It doesn't matter at first - there is so much redundancy - but eventually our bad lack-of-movement habits catch up and pain starts up seemingly out of nowhere. 


If we take our pain in to see a biomechanist, he or she will diagnose all sorts of postural and positional faults, then try to "cure" them. Such is the clunky conceptual lens of the biomechanist operator who relies on playing with bones for constructing his or her perceptual fantasies of "normal" movement. 


If we take our pain in to see a dermoneuromodulator or anyone with a clue about what the NS consists of or how it works out in the body or what it needs, they might be able to coax the system into feeding itself again; in fairly short order the motor output will change into something less static and more dynamic, and the pain "problems" will solve themselves, because they were never "nouns" in the first place - they were just verbs that stopped being able to move, physiologically.

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