Could my bra be causing my pain??? You betcha!
The clues are there if you know what to look for…
This conversation took place in my practice (Eastside Bodywork in Kirkland) this week:
Client: “I felt great for a while after our last session but then my symptoms started coming back.”
Me: “Okay. Do you remember what you did just before the symptoms came back? Did anything unusual happen?”
Client: “I remembered that you had told me to pay attention to anything unusual, so when the symptoms started showing up again I thought about it and realized that, after our last session I had been mostly working from home at my computer and I wasn’t wearing a bra around the house. Then, one day I went out and put on an underwire bra. I think the symptoms returned after that. Is this even possible?”
Me, with a BIG smile: “Of course it is possible. Great detective work! Let’s check it out.”
My client’s main complaint had been right Hamstring pain. During our last session I had corrected several compensation patterns and she left my office with all of her muscles working and her joints balanced. Then, all of that beauty went to shit (pardon my French) when she put on her underwire bra.
What had happened? Well, she’s a runner, so she usually wears tight sports bras. The repetitive pressure of the bra against her skin caused the bra area to become hyper sensitized over time, meaning that the slightest stimulus was leading to hyper signaling of the nerve endings to the brain.
You see, the brain has to rely on incoming information from nerve endings (proprioceptors) all over our body to make decisions about gland production or motor output. If the incoming signal could be perceived as a potential threat to the human, the brain will shut things down – or create a pain signal. Or both.
Through my P-DTR assessment I found that she presented with several deep pressure receptor fields (Pacini Corpuscles) that were hyper sensitive to stimulation. They were all over the area of her bra – under her chest/rib cage area, across the mid-back, and on top of her shoulders where shoulder straps can exert a lot of pressure, especially during running. After correcting the receptors by resetting their signaling to a normalized level, all of her leg and hip muscles tested strong again and stayed strong even when we applied pressure around the bra line. Mind you, I never even touched her glutes, hamstrings, or hip flexors.
This was such a fun treatment! I cannot begin to tell you how insanely proud I am of my client. First of all, she listened to what I had told her (“Pay attention to what you have been doing just before symptoms return.”).
Some clients get defensive when I say that and think that I want to put blame on them for something they did to bring the pain back. This couldn’t be further from the truth. My goal is to always to understand which movements they performed, what foods they ate, or if they were under unusual/excessive stress, etc. right BEFORE symptoms returned. That information then guides me to areas of the body that I want to check out next (which muscles were activated during that movement, is there a food sensitivity that we can address, is there an emotional component to the pain, etc.).
You see, the body always lays down compensation patterns. P-DTR has a great protocol to clear these patterns but sometimes there is another pattern over top of a dysfunction. When that top priority pattern then gets stimulated, the lower priority pattern returns immediately. That's how neurology works. In our case, it was the bra pressure that had a higher priority than the hip patterns.
Unfortunately, as of now, there is no way to trace up to THE ONE top priority receptor pair following a neurological protocol so we need to become detectives and figure out which parts of the body have been excessively stressed. Again, in our story here, it was the bra line.
Arthur Conan Doyle once said, “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” Except, I do. So, If you want to solve your body’s health puzzle, contact me. Let’s unravel the mystery together and get you feeling better.
