Doctors have a long history of dismissing and literally discarding many parts of the body as “extraneous,” only to discover years later that they are essential to good health.
Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, tonsils were viewed as troublesome appendages largely responsible for regular respiratory infections and routinely removed.
It was only in the late 20th century, with the advent of immunology, that doctors began to recognize that far from causing colds and flus, tonsils were the cavalry, forming a ring of immune-system tissue at the entrance to the respiratory and digestive tracts to act as a first line of defense.
Wrong again
Then there was the appendix, described by Charles Darwin as a “vestigial organ” with no apparent function—a remnant, he claimed, of a supposed larger digestive system used by our herbivore ancestors.
It took more than 100 years, until the early 21st century, for doctors to recognize that the appendix contains a good deal of lymphoid tissue, a part of the immune system that helps to educate and ultimately regulate immune system cells in young children.
And then between 2007 and 2010, researchers from Duke University confirmed the appendix is a safe house for beneficial gut bacteria. After antibiotics, severe diarrhea or any other insult to the gut’s microbiome, these harbored good-guy bacteria could be released and help to repopulate the intestine.
The latest “irrelevant” body part suddenly undergoing re-evaluation is fascia. It was long thought to be simply packing material around muscles and organs, so unimportant that surgeons operating on patients would routinely throw it away like so much bubble wrap.
Not until the late 20th century did doctors finally discover that muscles didn’t act in isolation. Any sort of movement operated through a chain of various tissues, and connective tissue like fascia played an important role in transmitting force between muscles, even influencing mechanical loading.
Specialized sensory receptors, called proprioceptors, located in muscles and joints, fed information back to the brain. But by the end of the 20th century, scientists recognized that fascia itself was centrally involved in this activity.
The body’s sixth sense
Doctor and professor of anatomy Jaap van der Wal at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands claimed that fascia contained a “sixth sense.” It played a vital role in proprioception, the body’s ability to position, move and sense itself in space, enabling you to do everything from walking to touching your nose with your eyes closed.
Then, in 2007, an international congress of medical specialists at Harvard University, from anatomists and surgeons to neuroscientists and physiotherapists, transformed fascia into a mainstream field of interest.
Research spearheaded by Dr Helene Langevin, former director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) at the US National Institutes of Health, demonstrated that fascia wasn’t static but could remodel over time and also respond to mechanical stimulation, such as rolling with a foam roller.
And physiotherapists and medical researchers confirmed that the fascia in the middle or lower back of people suffering from chronic low back pain was shaped differently from that of people with pain-free backs. More recent research shows that structural fascial issues may be behind temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain and even the painful foot condition plantar fasciitis.
Global communication system
But it’s only in the last 20 years that researchers have confirmed fascia as even more important than we thought it was. Robert Schleip, director of the Fascia Research Project at the University of Ulm in Germany has demonstrated that fascia is covered in pain receptors and autonomic nerve fibers, meaning this second skin is constantly reporting back from skin and muscles to the brain and autonomic nervous system.
Far from being simple structural tissue, fascia is now recognized for its role in mediating chronic pain, movement disorders, aging and even inflammatory processes. Medical scientists are slowly recognizing that the spiderweb covering our organs and muscles is nothing less than a global communication network connecting an array of mechanical, neurological and immune processes.
And now, possibly, even emotional issues. An increasing number of therapists and practitioners believe that tension from long-held emotions can get trapped in muscles and fascia.
Although the idea is not yet accepted by conventional medicine, increasing numbers of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and other practitioners view fascia as a kind of bridge between mind and body—relaying information about our emotional or psychological state directly to the nervous system. Trauma has such an impact on people at any age, they believe, that it may even affect the fascia’s shape.
Medicine makes a fundamental error in ever maintaining that any particular part of the body is superfluous. Time and again, we discover that when it comes to nature, there is no such thing as an irrelevance, and those who think otherwise ultimately get proven wrong.
Every last particle is necessary, every microscopic part essential to the whole. Our bodies are indeed a good deal smarter than the most educated of doctors. All of us ignore that truism at our peril.
