My wife and partner, Ann Frederick and I have a deep passion for all that is manual therapy and movement therapy. We recognize that our creation, Fascial Stretch Therapy is but a part, although a very important and overlooked part, of a body of work that benefits from international, cross-disciplinary, integrative and complementary contributions. That is why we attended both the First and Second Fascia Research Congresses. Not only did we get to network and party with manual and movement therapists and researchers from all over the globe at those conferences, but we were introduced to a very special person. That person is Paul Standley, PhD, Professor, Department of Basic Medical Sciences – The University of Arizona College of Medicine—Phoenix in partnership with Arizona State University.
Dr. Standley, originally a vascular physiologist, has a passion for researching the effects of manual therapy. He is one of the very few researchers who studied the effects of stretching on a cell. Naturally we were very interested in this study, so we met Dr. Standley and his staff this summer and took a tour of his huge research facility. Needless to say, we are now forming our initial hypothesis to start a host of studies in this new collaboration. Our hope is to add to the growing body of evidenced based research in manual therapy by studying the effects of Fascial Stretch Therapy on the human body.
We are also proud to have been part of the very first group of manual therapists accepted into an Interdisciplinary Fascia Research Course at one of the foremost fascia research centers of the world, the University of Ulm in Germany. We were honored to be part of a select group of 48 participants to listen to and rub elbows with some of the most prominent researchers of fascia like Robert Schleip, PhD, Andry Vleeming, PhD, Carla Stecco, MD and many more (see details of the course and the faculty at this link: http://www.uni-ulm.de/fileadmin/website_uni_ulm/zuv/zuv.dezI/AkademieWWT/Kursprogramm/Medizin_und_Biowissenschaften/Fascia/fascia_research_course.pdf).
With that introduction, I am excited to announce what will be a series of clinical case studies that I’d like to share with others interested in cross disciplinary and complementary manual and movement therapies. In the next blog post, I will start with the foot and ankle region, then move up to the knee, hip and so on until I complete all major body regions. Then I will continue presenting new case studies, so that over time I will provide an archive of categories that you can simply and easily look up by body region and symptom.
Please feel free to contribute comments or questions so we can all learn from each other and create stimulating dialogue that both satisfies our need to know and helps our clients and patients reach their goals.
By Chris Frederick, PT, PSI
Center: www.StretchToWin.com
Courses: www.stwinstitute.com
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Photo above is ultrasound imaging of the fascial layers of the hip of a course participant at the 2010 University of Ulm Fascia Research course.
