If you have read any of my other blogs, you will have realised by now:

I am addicted to learning EVERYTHING I can to help my patients
I keep finding new explanations and reasons as to why things happen in the body – and how all the systems are connected.

I reckon Visceral Manipulation is bridging the gap between the musculoskeletal system, the connective tissue, the nervous system and the organs. Are you seriously telling me the liver can cause headaches? Yes I am!

Let me start with the background of whom developed visceral manipulation. A chap named Jean-Pierre Barral was born in France in the mid forties. He started his career as a physiotherapist and went on to study Osteopathy. When he was working in a Lung Disease Hospital in his hometown, he had the opportunity to perform cadaver dissections (you know…looking inside bodies). He notice around the viscera (internal organs) was some extensive tissue thickenings and he realised these thickenings were altering the mechanical tensions on the surrounding tissues. This led Jean-Pierre into the theoretical and practical development of the visceral manipulation techniques that are taught in these courses.

The viscera are the internal organs of the body typically in the chest, thorax and abdomen. The quote below is taken directly from my study guide and it states that

“Visceral manipulation is a manual therapy consisting of gentle specifically placed manual forces that encourage normal mobility tone and inherent tissue motion of the viscera there connective tissue and other areas of the body were physiologic motion has been impaired.”

Our bodies need movement to be healthy (motion is lotion!) so for an organ to be healthy and functional optimally it has to be able to move with the structures and tissues surrounding it. If the tissues lose the normal motion, they do their job inefficiently and may become stuck. In a nutshell, Visceral Manipulation is assessing and treating the motion of an organ.

Musculoskeletal physiotherapists bread and butter has always been the muscular skeletal system including the skeleton, muscles, ligaments and tendons to name a few. As time has gone on we have discovered that the body is more interconnected than what we first thought. There is connective tissue that runs through the entire body, through the different layers of tissue and surrounds every organ. If you take away the skin, the muscles and the vascular system but left the connective tissue in place you would have the perfect outline of a human being. Connective tissue must be able to move between the layers of tissue within the body. When there are restrictions present it can cause restrictions in other places of the body.

So why on earth would I want to be concerned with the organs you ask? Well let me tell you. Through his extensive research and clinical practice Jean-Pierre has discovered organs are connected to other structures and even emotional response is due to the extensive neural (nerve) network throughout the body. In the next blog, I will use the liver as an example of an organ can connect to the rest of the body.

This was a fantastic course. My class mates above were a cracker bunch of humans. I learnt so much from them as well as the course itself. I don’t say it often but I was blessed and privileged to meet them all. If you are a manual therapist, massage therapist, physio, osteopath – you need to get on one of these courses. It will change how you practice!

If you want to learn more about this amazing therapy, please check out https://www.barral.co.nz/ or send me an email and I will gladly share my experience.