The Organs Beneath the Pain
Most stubborn muscle pain isn't a muscle problem. What the viscera have to say — and why almost nobody thinks to listen.
The French osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral taught that sixty to eighty percent of soft-tissue pain traces back to some dysfunction in the organs. After all my years of practice, I believe him. It is one of the most useful things I know — and one of the least known.
Here is why it stays hidden. The organs are wrapped in their own nervous system, and when an organ is unhappy, it rarely says so directly. It refers. The signal shows up in muscle and soft tissue, sometimes far from home — so we blame the muscle, and the muscle was only the messenger.
One gets to be a detective.
The patterns are surprisingly consistent. A gallbladder under strain speaks up in the mid-back, right between the shoulder blades. The liver refers into the right shoulder and the right side of the neck — I have followed right-sided neck pain down to the liver more times than I can count. Even the hip can be carrying an organ's story.
What treating an organ looks like
Gentler than you would imagine. The organs are suspended in fascia — every one of them is meant to move and glide as you breathe and walk. When that glide is lost, the work is to restore it: slow, quiet, listening work with the hands. Nothing forced. The body does the correcting; I help it find the room to do so.
So if a pain keeps returning no matter how faithfully it gets massaged and stretched, ask a different question. Not "what is wrong with this muscle?" but "what is this muscle answering for?" The answer is often one layer deeper.
— Leigh Ankrum