Cohesion of being

I have this rib that slips out of place. When it does, I get a sharp and lasting pinch where the vertebrate it should articulate with is, and sharp pinches at the front, where the rib wraps around my liver and connects with my sternum. It's annoying and makes everything from bending forward to moving my arms to carrying a backpack harder so I usually get myself into see my osteopath as soon as I can.

This time, though, I was trying to wait until my new health insurance kicked in (February 1st) and over the past three weeks, I witnessed my body shift to compensate for its new position. My rib slipped out and then my right shoulder tightened up. My right illium slipped up and rotated back and then it felt like my ankle fell apart. Like a pile of blocks had been knocked over, it felt like all the bones that make up the ankle joint collapsed in a shapeless pile. This week, when another rib and two cervical vertebrate went out of alignment, I could hardly stand so I finally called my osteopath.

Osteopathy, is, in my opinion, divine medicine. It is just heaven. Like CranioSacral therapy, it is light touch manual therapy, and osteopaths work with the body holistically and interact with the body rather than impose correction on it.

Anyway, I went in and Dr. Scholars, who I have been working with for awhile now, slowly worked out all the shifts my body made after my rib slipped. When she finally circled back to my rib, she suggested that it was my over-taxed liver (nope, not because I am having that much fun but because of all the meds I have taken over the past year to keep Lyme in check) causing it to slip. Vertebrate (so ribs too) correlate with the organ that is on the same neural pathway and together, the organ and vertebrate can create negative feedback loops: when an organ is under stress or not functioning well, it sends distress signal up the neural pathway and the correlating vertebrate and/or rib responds with pain or movement, sending new signals down the nerve to the organ.

It makes sense to me, actually, especially as I was just reading about the spine-organ connection a few days previously but to witness it in my own body, through a doctor's input, really shifted, once again, my understanding of my body and bodies in general. So often, when I have studied anatomy or physiology or learned any method of training, the education addresses individual muscles, muscle groups and the skeletal system, as if we could understand musculature in isolation from the rest of the body, when the body actually works cohesively at all times.