You’re Like an Economy

The human body is a complex economy unto itself.  Your body takes in resources, produces materials, it builds and destroys and renovates continuously.  It stores and uses resources it has acquired or crafted.  It makes different cell types, tissues, organs and systems that all combine into a dynamic unit of function: your living breathing conscious self.   This living economy sends messages and transports materials and waste to and from its cells in a continuous flow of life.

NAVL: The Rivers of Life

The anatomy of life’s communication and transportation is the nerve, artery, vein, lymphatic.  We call it NAVL (pronounced “navel”), and it largely travels in a neurovascular bundle through fascial tunnels, tubes and compartments. For example, the portal triad running to the liver through the hepato-duodenal ligament in the abdomen.  Or the carotid sheath in the neck, transmitting the vagus nerve, deep cervical lymphatics, carotid artery and internal jugular vein.  The NAVL also passes through openings like the aortic hiatus, vena cava or esophagus openings in the diaphragm.

Why does this matter? When these compartments are open and resilient, life flows. Oxygen and nutrients arrive. Waste is removed and disposed. The nerves are not irritated, autonomics are well balanced, and signals transmit clearly. Your cells, tissues, and organs have what they need to function, build, repair, and thrive.

Living is Stressful

Stress is the load we carry, and it’s unavoidable as a physical living being.  Work posture and repetitive motions, injuries, childbirth, and all the little bumps, knocks, and sleeps each night—these create forces: compression, tension, torsion. Over time, the body compensates and adapts in a way that puts a lot of stress on the NAVL.  Most often it’s just a gradual effect over years and decades before major symptoms appear.  But all along, the rivers of life have been compromised, and any given industry in the body’s economy has been suffering in recession.

Here’s what matters: resilience at the cellular level is way down, and with enough time it leads to health problems in tissues, organs, and systems. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Your Weakest Link Breaks First

Which symptoms appear depends on your constitution—your body’s unique structural pattern, its physiology and its vulnerabilities to load, impact, and repetitive forces.

This is why the same structural distortion can lead to completely different diseases in different people; or the same disease between people can be the result of different structural distortions.  And that’s why thinking osteopathically, assessing and treating the structural relationships of the body, works effectively and has a good track record of finding health.

Restore the Flow

Classical Osteopathy is successful because it addresses this fundamental reality: health returns with renewed movement and normal relationships between structures, because that’s when the NAVL functions optimally.  Your body economy can restore and thrive as its self-regulating mechanisms work well again.

Structure isn’t separate from function. Structure determines what’s possible. When the rivers flow freely, health is the natural result. When the pipes get kinked, pathology is underway.