Summer 2017 Newsletter

Team Updates

• We welcome Christine Grimes, RMT to the Vitality team. She uses a holistic approach to health and focuses her treatments on the interconnected myofascial system to relieve pain and remediate soft tissue limitations. Her treatments draw from a variety of influences, such as Thai Massage, Yoga, Structural Integration, John Barnes Myofascial Release and Trigger Point Therapy.
• Also new to the Vitality team is Monica Cleland, RMT, BA, who focuses on Scar Tissue Release, Myofascial Release, Cranialsacral Therapy, and Visceral Manipulation. Read more about these specialized therapies below, in her two articles featured in this newsletter.
• Elizabeth Anderson, RMT is back until end of July 2017, and does direct billing to select extended health plans.

Direct Billing to Extended Health Plans

Some practitioners are now offering direct billing to selected extended health plans, including Pacific Blue Cross and GreenShield Canada. Direct billing to Great West Life is coming soon. Ask individual practitioners for details:

Alison Sadler, RMT
Christine Grimes, RMT
Elizabeth Anderson, RMT
Sabrina Lundquist, RAc

Try Acupuncture – It's now easier than ever!

Your body knows how to heal itself of a 1000 little injuries and illnesses. It has healed a thousand forgotten paper cuts and vanquished hundreds of colds. Acupuncture helps refocus this knowledge to encourage your body to heal a little faster. Much like our brain can be a little foggy some mornings and our hands a little uncoordinated, our healing resources can be a bit disorganized too.

Come in for a FREE 20 minute consultation to review if acupuncture can help you or someone you love.

Sabrina Lundquist, B.Sc., RAc offers direct billing to Pacific Blue Cross and GreenShield Canada. Direct billing to Great West Life is coming soon.

Initial appointments are usually 75 minutes, but follow up appointments can be 45-90 minutes long depending on your treatment needs.

Afternoon, evening and weekend appointments available.

Learn more about Acupuncture »

Fascia: What is it? Five Facts
by Monica Cleland, RMT

We hear about it, we talk about it, it has a hum on the street – it's important – but, what is it? Here we'll take a look at it in simple terms, through five points of understanding.

1. Fascia is everywhere in your body

It lines your organs. It lines and infuses with your muscles and helps attach them to your bones. It lines your bones too. It forms pathways for your delicate nerves, arteries, and veins to run through – tunnels to transport the fluids that sustain you. Fascia is a three-dimensional web connecting every structure in your entire body, from head to toe, without interruption. It is a continuous unit, flowing from one form to the next, changing shape and tone depending on the structure it infuses with.

2. Fascia is made of three main materials

Elastin is the stretchy, elastic fibres at the core; collagen is the extremely tough, inflexible material coiling around the elastin; and together they bathe in the matrix, a gel-like substance.

3. Fascia keeps everything together

Fascia is designed to protect you, to keep your internal structures properly positioned, to allow the different parts of your body to slide and glide around each other as you move, and allow your body to maintain its shape. If we took away all of you except your fascia, you would still maintain your shape.

4. Fascia can become stuck

Fascia has the natural tendency to become solidified, shortened and thickened when the body goes through a trauma or inflammatory process, or exhibits poor posture over time – either stress or injury induced. Fascia will organize itself along the lines of tension that are imposed on it. These lines of tension created at the time of injury tend to stay in the body through time; they don't reset after the tissue heals. Over time these trauma/injury-induced fascial lines of tension will pull the body into themselves, and out of its natural, crucial, three-dimensional alignment. This pulling and distortion from our natural alignment forces the body into exerting an enormous amount of energy to sustain centred balance, and often results in chronic physical pain symptoms developing at the site of the distorted and stretched tissue.

5. Massage therapy can loosen fascia, promoting healing and reducing chronic pain

Thickened, dense fascia that has adapted to lines of tension and pulled the body out of alignment can be manually mobilized and softened such that it moves with the body rather than in opposition to the body, freeing and settling nearby painful distorted areas once again. Visceral Manipulation addresses the fascial tissue involving organs. Myofascial release addresses the muscular layers of connective tissue. Cranialsacral therapy addresses the fascia enveloping the central nervous system including cranium, spine and sacrum and associated brain, spinal cord, and nerve roots. Together this combination of manual techniques are used to treat connective tissue in the body – resetting alignment and thus decreasing or removing chronic physical pain.

Pregnancy and C-sections
by Monica Cleland, RMT

Pregnancy and the birth of your child is one of the most important events that will happen in your life. Childbirth comes in many ways and sometimes circumstances necessitate a Caesarian section birth, where an incision is made through the mother's abdomen and uterus to deliver the baby.

When this becomes necessary, the procedure takes place, you and your newborn child are united, and soon the incision in your abdomen begins to heal – as you are quickly spun into motherhood. There are some important details about what a scar is and how it works, as well as how to avoid and prevent any possible issues or problems that may arise down the road.

It's important to know that all people scar differently. Many of you will have an incision that heals into a soft, mobile scar. Some of you will create an excessive amount of scar tissue in response to an incision.

You may already know if this sounds like you: you may have had previous injuries which resulted in thick, tough scars causing pulling and tethering forces in your body. The result may be problematic for you in subtle, seemingly unrelated ways, in the years and decades to come, in two ways:

First, a thickened and tough area will gather tissue into itself over time, causing your posture to slowly be pulled forward, possibly leading to chronic shoulder or neck issues, and headaches.

Second, since freedom of a structure affects its function, you may lose optimal function of the structures near the scar. This can include changed bladder function such as incontinence and excessive urination; or IBS symptoms, constipation, and diarrhea – as your colon and bladder share space in your pelvic bowl, and overly tough and thickened scars cause three-dimensional pulling and tethering in the general area over time.

If your body's healing process lies on the end of the spectrum which correlates with excessive production of thick and dense scar tissue, you might want to find ways to soften and mobilize your C-section scar. Whether it's been 6 weeks, or 10 years, some gentle mobilization can be highly effective and beneficial for your body both in terms of postural alignment and bodily function.

Scar tissue is in essence fascia tissue that is less vascularized, less hydrated, and less elastic, but more collagen-based.

Manual fascial release allows re-hydration, as well as mobilization of the collagen tissue, and re-activation of the ground substance the collagen sits in, creating more mobile and more softened scar tissue.

Visceral Manipulation addresses the fascial tissue involving organs: the large intestine, cecum, bladder, rectum and uterus are commonly bound in C-section related scar tissue.

Myofascial release addresses the muscular layers of connective tissue commonly bound in C section scarring such as the abdominal layers of muscles where they attach to the pubic bone.

Cranialsacral therapy addresses the fascia enveloping the central nervous system including cranium, spine and sacrum and associated brain, spinal cord and nerve roots. The epidural site in the lumbar spine can be addressed using cranial sacral therapy.

Learn more about Scar Tissue Release »