Bernie - Re Bill's Other Knee

[Guest guest]

I tried the other knee, and he obtained some relief of pain, but he

continues to have a lot of stiffness it seems in the thigh muscle

and or ligaments?,tendons?, above the knee. Also his gait is off.

When walking it looks like he is throwing that leg from the hip,

rather like a person with a leg prosthesis who kind of moves it from

the hip. It concerns me. He had a menisectomy on that knee

approximately 2.5 years ago because of pain and that is the one he

always called his trick knee since a twisting injury on glare ice

many years previously. He just lived with knowing that it

periodically would give way on him. Perhaps the problem is lack of

strength in the calf or foot.

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I'm getting a mental flash of a fascial restriction, roughly T11-T12

at the spine, diagonally down into the leg and/or foot - similar to

what Barb went through for 15 years. Fascial restrictions in the

lower thoracic/lumbar back can exert a pull all the way to foot,

causing severe lateral rotation and stress on the hip, knee and

ankle, depending on how far they reach. And it would be consistent

with a long-standing postural compensation to " protect " that trick

knee.

I would inclined to bet his " problem " originates above the knee and

not at the foot. It is more likely that his foot issue is just a

symptom and not the cause.

It is easy to assess for a fascial restriction. The only hard part

is getting the right amount of pressure in your touch. How good are

your palpation skills from your RN training? Have him stretch out

on the bed or floor with his shirt off (you need skin to skin

contact to properly engage the tissue and not the clothes to avoid a

false reading.) At any rate, the " layers " are skin, lymph, fascia

and muscle - in that order. You want pressure into the tissue only

to the depth of the fascia - in other words, light and not very deep

at all. Once you are at the right " depth " you simply glide the flat

of your hand (palmar surface) across the skin in all directions -

foot to head, head to foot, left to right, right to left, spine to

hip, hip to spine, etc. If there is a restriction, your hand

will " stick " and not glide smoothly. The more severe the restriction

the greater the sense of " sticking. " In really severe cases, your

hand will literally just stop. It will glide smoothly in one

direction and just simply stop in another.

Test him per the above and get back to me. If he does have fascial

restrictions I can give you instructions for a couple of different

ways to treat it. One would be manual, standard MFR releases. The

other is energetic. I have found in the last few months that I get

equally good if not better results using Polarity or Acupressure as

I do straight MFR. With the manual method, I am focusing

specifically on the fascial issues. With the energetic approach,

the fascial releases just seem to happen as a by-product of the

energy work.

Another possibility is to do " bone two-pointing. " This is a

variation of MFR but it is purely energetic work. You basically put

the tips of the fingers of one hand in/on the knee (whereever you

are drawn to put them) and the tips of the fingers of your other

hand on the hip joint (or other areas around the hip, again

whereever you feel drawn). I have used this method in the past for

loosening fascial restrictions, muscle tension, and even to actually

get a twisted leg bone to realign itself. I wasn't trying to get

the leg bone to realign, it just did it on its own.