October 20, 2018

Treating my dad's WWII wound in the 1970s with New Age methods

Jack Kemp

My late father was very physically strong nearly to the end of his life at age eighty-six. He hated to take pills or see doctors for a physical checkup. My mother once had to argue with him to get a tetanus shot because he had stepped on a rusty nail. But circumstances caused him to go with me to a type of New Age physical therapy called Rolfing when he was in his fifties.

I was visiting my parents in the mid to late 1970s when they informed me that my father's legs had stiffened up on him, that he could not put on his socks without great effort and pain. He had first gone to a typical doctor of that time, a hack who had prescribed Valium and gave him a chart of exercises.My mother had started the conversation but my father joined in to protest the doctor's simplistic advice of "make exercises" because he was visibly in too much pain to do that. He clearly was open to alternative healing suggestions from his "crazy American" son, myself.
It happened that I had previously undergone an unusual type of New Age physical therapy developed by Ida Rolf, a PhD. who had researched this to help her young son with his twisted spine. She found that the connective tissue, that makes up something called fascia, holds all our major muschles in place was made up of collagen in a microscopic criss-cross pattern. It is the thin milky white layer covering parts of the chicken drumbsticks that you see when you buy them raw at the supermarket. And, more importantly, if you press your hand or your elbow into that layer of fascia covering your muscles, you can get the hardened collagen, such as in the example of scar tissue, to loosen up and actually move so that muscles - and the skeletal bones they pull on - can shift to allow people less physical stress and better posture. Practitioners took Polaroid photos (now probably digital photos) before and after (ten standard ten session treatments to show the clients the often remarkable improvement in their posture. It happened to me, freeing up the spine bones of my upper neck and changing the way my feet were placed on the ground.

Early 1970s methods of Rolfing were somewhat painful compared to current methods. In fact, this was parodied in the 1977 pro football comedy movie "Semi-Tough" starring Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. About half the movie makes fun of New Age popular fads. It had Lotte Lenya, the same actress who played the arch Soviet spy Rosa Kleb in James Bond movie "From Russia With Love," here portraying a copy of Ida Rolf herself as a character named "Clara Pelf" who caused the football player who went to her for treatment much pain. But if I could deal with the sessions, I knew my WWII veteran father could also deal with them. And the pain subsided very quickly.

Now I happened to have met some other New York Rolfing practitioners after my sessions in a meditation class and one of them was an actual medical doctor from the South, an older man with gray hair. I figured this practitioner would be the one to accompany my father as we went to treat his pains. My father agreed to go to an appointment.

Dr. Downing, tall and strong and thoughtful, looked the part of a doctor. My father explained his leg problem, what doctors call a presenting problem or presenting symptom. He also talked to Dr. Downing about his bullet wound injury, the bullet passing through his lower hip bone and how he packed it with a rag at that time. The doctor called my father a "tough man" and told my dad to strip down to his underpants and put him on a massage table on his back. Dr. Downing then spent the entire first session just loosening the connective tissue along his bottom front ribs, where the diaphram is connected. My father went to sleep on the table and Dr. Downing explained to me that the changes in the position of his muscles and skeleton, along with changes in his posture, had sent many overwhelming signals to my dad's brain. So my dad needed to sleep to process all the new information coming from his body. At the end of the session, my dad got up and put on the rest of his clothes. He immediately said that this was the first time in weeks that he had been able to put on his socks with no pain. Once again, the good doctor never touched my dad's leg because he saw where the tension was coming from in my dad's body - and he knew that all this collagen-based fascia was connected throughout the body.

At the end of this first session, I told Dr. Downing "thank you" and said "when my dad feels better, I feel better." The doctor knowingly agreed. I accompanied my dad to the next few sessions but I don't clearly remember after all these years whether he went to the final sessions with or without me. The later sessions, more standard in their areas of concentration, dealt in part more directly with my dad's leg muscles and even his hip bone's connective tissue. I don't mean to blow my own horn here. I am no doctor but I may have gotten my father help that extended his life span. A whole lot of other adult children would have done the same using this or another method to help their parents. I definitely got my dad relief from his immediate pain. And I hope this story is an inspiration and a source of information for anyone having issues involving bad chronic posture for decades or other similar problems. I hired a Rolfer again a decade later when I got hit in the forehead with a bolt from a construction site and was experiencing headaches. The newer Rolfer said that my neck muscles had flinched and contracted and he loosened them which did, in fact, releave my head pain.

Additional Information:

http://rolfcellulite.com/more.html

What is Rolfing®

Rolfing was developed by Ida Rolf, Ph.D., 60 years ago first to help her son who was told he needed to be in a body cast for five years. Dr. Rolf instead "Rolfed" him, Tim went on to be a surfing champion. Since then, more than a million people have been Rolfed. Today, Rolfers practice throughout the world, assisting clients in releasing chronic stress and aligning their bodies.

The slow, precise soft tissue manipulation of Rolfing releases the chronic stress/tension held in the fascia, the body´s connective tissue that holds us together. This same fascia, which Hans Styles, M.D., the father of stress research called the organ of stress, is the same tissue that binds fat cells. Each person tightens their fascial network differently from years of various form of stress.

Women are more likely to have the misfortune to create fascial adhesions (or scar tissue) that allow cellulite to develop. When this particular form of fascial adhesion is created in the hips and rear, women can accumulate fat. It is as if the fat gets trapped in these areas, unable to escape.

Rolfing increases blood circulation, which can help fat slowly dissolve. As many will tell you, the normal remedies of exercise and diet often do not work to reduce cellulite. You can run marathons and eat the purest diet and still have cellulite hips. Without proper circulation, fat will not dissolve.

Rolfing is not a panacea. Other actions are occasionally required to get the desired change. Yet, if fascial restriction is a component of the cellulite remaining, Rolfing may be what is needed to remove it.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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