Myokinesthetic System
A Fresh Approach to Pain Relief
By Dr. Michael Uriarte, Summer 2004 issue of Massage Therapy Journal - vol. 43 no. 2
The following article was written by Dr. Michael Uriarte, founder of the Myokinesthetic System. Some of the examples and language are directed specifically toward massage therapists and others in the health care industry. For questions about Myokinesthetic System and how it may help you, contact us at BodyworkLas Vegas.com, or call us at (702) 372-7228.
Time is a precious commodity these days. People want to pull up to the fast-food window and have their food ready without slowing down the car. The same goes for their health. If they can just feel as relaxed and have a greater reduction in pain in less time, they will line up outside your door, so long as they don't have to wait.
The massage profession is the most giving profession I have experienced. I have observed the wonderful benefits of soft tissue work over the years. Someone once told me that I should have been a therapist instead of a doctor, because I don't "act" like a doctor. I believe he meant that I was interested in helping the person, not just in making money.
Over the years I have seen therapists work long, hard hours, and not see the results with their clients that they wanted... A few years ago, I developed a technique that increases results and only takes a fraction of the time that a therapist normally spends with a client.
This method, the MyoKinesthetic System, is the soft tissue equivalent of Chiropractic. It does not involve adjusting or moving of bones, but teaches a therapist how to be specific by stimulating the nervous system. With this technique we do not work an "area." We have mapped out the nerve roots and the peripheral nerves, where they travel and which muscles to treat to have a specific impact. The beauty of this technique is that because we are specifically treating the nervous system, we don't have to work every fiber of the muscles we are treating. The power of this technique is not how we treat the muscles, but rather which muscles to stimulate.
The nervous system is not exclusive to any one health-care profession. A medical doctor will influence the nerve root or the nervous system with a shot or medication. A chiropractor will influence a nerve root or the nervous system with an adjustment. With the MyoKinesthetic System, a therapist learns to influence specific peripheral nerves and the nervous system by manipulating the muscles.
To begin, we first clear the unbalanced memory of the muscles. Then we re-educate the flexors and extensors, the opposition muscles, to restore full range of motion in our clients. The exciting part of this technique is that each treatment is different for every client, depending on what his or her problem is. Some treatments take as little as three to four minutes, while others may take up to 15 minutes, depending on how many muscles we need to treat for that particular problem. We bill per treatment, not per minute.
How the System Works
This method is a way to treat the cause of pain, the nervous system, in a specific way via the muscles. This system follows a nerve root down its pathway to the muscles that it innervates. Then it groups these muscles according to their nerve root innervation, covering every nerve root and peripheral nerve that deals with movement.
As a health-care practitioner, I look for repeatable results. This system consistently rids clients of pain in less than 15 minutes. Each treatment goes after the cause of pain, which is the nervous system... This allows the therapist the ability to treat more clients with greater success in less time. This technique is a stand-alone treatment. It is not an adjunct to other treatments, nor does it need to be mixed with other professions.
We all know that the nervous system is the prime controller of homeostasis, which enables the body to stay alive in an ever-changing environment. The nervous system controls your heart and how it beats, how hard you breathe, when you feel hungry; it makes you sweat when you feel hot. It controls muscle movement, contraction and relaxation; it controls when you feel pain, the location of pain and the type of pain. Every time you touch someone, you are stimulating the nervous system. Unfortunately, many massage therapists have not been specifically taught about the nervous system.
My philosophy is that the two professions of Chiropractic and massage therapy should work together. Muscles are connected to bones. Whether a bone gets forced out of place because of an accident or pulled out of place by a muscle in spasm, the end result is the same; the muscle is not working properly and the bone is not moving properly.
As you enter Palmer College of Chiropractic, based in Davenport Iowa, there is a sign above one of the doors that reads: "Chiropractic is specific or it is nothing."
A chiropractor tries to impact the nervous system by rendering an adjustment, trying to move a single bone and finding a way to impact a single nerve root. A nerve root is the junction between the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). By stimulating the nerve root with an adjustment, a chiropractor can achieve immediate and long lasting results in a person's health.
It was not my intention to develop a new technique, but that is where my research led me. I took the chiropractic philosophy of being specific, and applied it to the muscles. This is not chiropractic, but a soft-tissue technique. This system does not move/adjust bones; it impacts the nerve roots by treating specific muscles. Not only is this system able to have an impact at one nerve root and help people with their pain, but because this system is being specific with which muscles to treat, a therapist does not have to treat he muscles for very long to have an impact. The power of this technique comes from the grouping of which muscles to treat, not how to treat them. Every muscle innervated by a single nerve root has its memory cleared after a treatment. This not only helps relieve the person's pain, but also assists in making postural changes as well.
The ultimate goal is to get to the cause of pain, which is the nervous system. Muscles can
impinge on nerves, causing pain. To obtain consistent, repeatable results, you must be
specific. The more specific you are, the more likely you are to help the patient. With this
system, a therapist does not have to work for 30 to 60 minutes to get every muscle relaxed.
If you stimulate only the specific muscles innervated by one nerve root, then a treatment takes
less than 15 minutes.
The concept can be thought of like a telephone cable. At the beginning of a street with 20 houses, it starts off with 20 small wires within it. As it travels down the road, it drops off one little wire to each house. Think of the PNS as being similar, with the nerve root having many little wires within it, and then traveling down a large peripheral nerve and dropping off wires at each muscle.
For example, the C6 nerve root innervates 41 different muscles in the upper body bilaterally.
With this system, we stimulate those 41 muscles - and only those 41 muscles - so that all of
those muscles will relax and stay relaxed for a longer time frame. If one of those muscles is in
a contracted state and impinging on a nerve, causing numbness in the hand, we can get rid of this
numbness effortlessly and quickly with lasting results.
Helping the client is the number one goal of the health-care professional. A lot of therapists think "If I work more muscles, I am doing this person a favor; they will feel better." But actually if you are trying to help someone who has shoulder pain, and you work more than the 31 muscles innervated by the C5 nerve, you might end up stimulating the C6 nerve root more, in which case> you are telling the body and brain that you are trying to help with a problem in the hand. Consequently, you have worked too long and too hard without achieving your desired result.
There are a number of treatments that use a stretch and compress technique. The MyoKinesthetic System differs by targeting specific muscles to stimulate during a treatment. However, the movements may be similar to other techniques. For example, if I want to stretch the biceps, I need to extend the elbow. I can do this with the client standing, sitting, lying on the stomach, lying on the side, etc. The end result with any of these positions is extension of the elbow. For this technique, every muscle of the upper body is stimulated while the client is seated. This allows for ease and quickness of a treatment.
I have been doing research on this for more than 12 years, and one significant thing I have found is that the therapist does not need to treat the muscle until it relaxes. The reason is because this system stimulates and clears the memory of all the muscles in a specific way, this sends information up through a single nerve root in the CNS into the brain, then back down the CNS through the single nerve root to each muscle treated. This allows every muscle along this nerve root pathway to relax more fully, for a longer time.
About the Treatment
There are three parts to this treatment. First is a passive stretch, which clears the memory of the muscle. Second is an active stretch, which reeducates the muscles. And third, if needed, is a pinpoint compression for problem areas.
Let me explain the stretches. In a passive stretch, the client is in a relaxed state and the therapist moves the client's muscles through their range of motion. Be sure not to overstretch a muscle. Every joint has a ligament. The purpose of a ligament is to prevent a joint from moving too far. If the therapist takes a muscle into a stretch and then goes further, the therapist starts to stretch the ligament and stops stretching the muscle. Over time this will cause injury, which is the opposite of what we in the health-care profession want. With this technique, it's important we stay within each person's own joint range of motion.
If clients have their rhomboids in spasm, they could possibly look like they are standing at attention in the military. The rhomboids are in a contracted state, and the pectoralis major is in a stretched state. This client will not have full range of motion in the shoulder. The therapist will take the client's rhomboids into a passive stretch. To stretch the right rhomboid major and minor muscles, take the patient's right hand and place it on the left shoulder. Grasp the elbow and push in an upward and backward (superior and posterior) direction, and then stimulate the rhomboids. A therapist can stimulate the muscles either by gliding, cross friction, or straight compression, whatever method the therapist thinks is most comfortable. The passive stretch on each muscle only needs to be done four to six times to clear the memory of each muscle.
The second aspect is an active stretch. This is where the client activates the opposite muscle(s) that the therapist is stimulating. So with our example, the client would actively bring the arm across the chest to activate the pectoralis major muscle; meanwhile, the therapist would still be stimulating the rhomboid muscle. Again, this is telling the muscle in spasm, "when this muscle ontracts, you must relax." This active stretch only needs to be done four to six times to help reeducate the muscles.
The third aspect is pinpoint compression. This is only done if a muscle is in a contracted state, or if there are trigger points in the muscle. If the therapist can feel either of these during the passive and active treatments, the therapist will go back to this muscle for what I call pinpoint compression. The therapist will again take the client through a range of motion, but this time focusing on the problem muscle and the problem within this muscle. During the passive and active movements the therapist is stimulating the origin, insertion, and belly of each muscle; however during pinpoint compression, the therapist is focusing on the trigger point itself. This pinpoint compression only needs to be done four to six times.
Remember, this technique treats all the muscles innervated by a single nerve root. Some muscles will be in spasm and have trigger points and other muscles will not. The muscles that are in spasm or have trigger points will be treated with up to 18 stretches; the other muscles will be treated with around eight stretches. There is a rhythm to this technique, and each therapist has his or her own. I treat with a faster repetition and the therapists in my office treat with a slower repetition; we get the same results with our clients.
The stretch is the most important part of this technique; the stimulation of the muscle is secondary. The compression does not have to be deep, so the therapist does not have to exert a lot of force. The stretch is most important to make sure the correct muscle is being affected. The compression will help hone in on the specific nerve root to affect, thereby relaxing all the muscles along this pathway.
Let me give a few examples. By bringing the client's arm across the chest with the palm facing down, the therapist can stretch the middle trapezius. By bringing the client's arm across the chest with the palm facing up, the therapist can stretch the latissimus dorsi and teres major.
By opening the fingers and working between the metacarpal bones, the therapist is
stretching and affecting the palmar interossei muscles. By extending the fingers and working
between the metacarpal bones, the therapist is now stretching and affecting the lumbricales.
This is why I say the stretch is the most important aspect, because without proper placement
of the client, you will not get the desired results.
Conclusion
Why is it important to be specific? So we can obtain repeatable results. A chiropractor tries to move a single bone one way to have an impact at a single nerve root. If you stimulate all the muscles of the upper body, you are being one-ninth as specific as someone who stimulates only the muscles from one nerve root. If you stimulate all the muscles of the lower body, you are being one-seventh as specific as this technique. This technique is geared to help with specific complaints, and to relieve a client's pain faster and for a longer period of time. I have found over the years that the more specific I am, the less I have to work, and the greater the results! All it takes is less than 15 minutes to get [clients] out of pain, and to have it last. It doesn't take a lot of time, and this is difficult for some therapists to understand. They still want to work per minute, to spend at least 30 to 60 minutes per client... It gives [therapists] the ability to treat more clients with greater success in less time.
As I said earlier, the number one goal for anyone who works in the health-care profession is to help others. The method described in this article epresents a way to treat the pain's cause - the nervous system - in a specific way via the muscular system. You can cut treatment time down to 15 minutes and get better results. Be specific and get consistent, repeatable results!