Episode

Episode | Quick Take

Episode 152 centers on a lively conversation between Kevin and Dr. Kate Oland Galligan as they trace her path from a curious undergrad to a passionate fascia educator and clinician. The duo challenges old perceptions of fascia, recounting stories from early lab experiences where fascia was simply “ripped out,” and contrasting them with new insights on its dynamic, interconnected nature. They reveal how subtle fascial restrictions can cause significant clinical symptoms—linking pelvic imbalances to jaw pain—and explore the emerging field of mind-body connections in fascial therapy.

0:00:00 | Introduction
0:00:55 | Introducing Kate Introducing Fascia
0:17:06 | Fascia Mini Lesson *
0:20:00 | Rip That Fascia Out!
0:37:14 | Get Ready for Annual Debriefing* *
0:39:00 | The Hip Bone is Connected to the Jaw Bone
1:03:08 | We’re on Substack! *
1:06:13 | Mind-Body Connections
1:21:45 | Staying Connected

* Breaks

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Episode | Transcript

The A&P Professor podcast (TAPP radio) episodes are made for listening, not reading. This transcript is provided for your convenience, but hey, it’s just not possible to capture the emphasis and dramatic delivery of the audio version. Or the cool theme music.  Or laughs and snorts. And because it’s generated by a combo of AI robot and human transcription, it may not be exactly right. So I strongly recommend listening by clicking the audio player provided or the captioned audiogram.

Introduction

Kevin Patton (00:00:00):
In his recent book, Architecture of Human Living Fascia, the surgeon and researcher Jean-Claude Guimberteau states, “Understanding fascia requires abandoning the traditional anatomical view of separate structures and embracing a model of interconnected living tissues.”

Aileen Park (00:00:25):
Welcome to The A&P Professor. A few minutes to focus on teaching human anatomy and physiology with a veteran educator and teaching mentor, your host, Kevin Patton.

Kevin Patton (00:00:34):
In episode 152, Dr. Kate Oland Galligan joins me for a discussion of the human fascial system.

Introducing Kate Introducing Fascia

Kevin Patton (00:00:56):
Well, in this episode, I am so excited to be here with Dr. Kate Oland Galligan, who it turns out is a former undergraduate student of mine who in physiology at St. Louis University, back when I directed that course and taught that course. And at the recent HAPS conference, we sort of accidentally ran into one another and reconnected and have had some conversations. And one of those conversations was about fascia because as we’ll talk about in a moment, she’s really into fascia in her clinical life as well as her teaching life because guess what? She’s now teaching anatomy and physiology to the undergraduates at St. Louis University. Oh man, what goes around comes around, right? I did confirm that one of the things that she remembers that from my course was the Krebs cycle.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:01:59):
Oh.

Kevin Patton (00:01:59):
Yeah. See. For those of you that have been with us for a long time in this podcast, way back in episode 79, I talked about the story that I tell in my class just to kind of break things up and make a little bit more fun. And now I have a witness to confirm. So, what were your thoughts when we were doing that silly Krebs cycle thing in class, Kate?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:02:24):
Oh, it was just so silly, but I remember taking things so seriously in undergrad and this was a serious class, but here is this guy having fun with physiology, so it made you more human and I think that made it easier for us to receive information from you. And clearly that’s how I remembered that you taught me 24 years ago.

Kevin Patton (00:02:51):
Kate, what have you been doing in those 24 years?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:02:56):
I’ve been a little busy. I’ve done some things. So, I was in your physiology class in undergrad at the time I was working on my bachelor’s in exercise science, and then soon after that I finished my master’s in physical therapy. I started working as a physical therapist and it was a pretty cool time to be a physical therapist. So, at that time I could start working with my master’s, but then I continued to work on my doctorate and I finished that a couple years later. So, I worked as a physical therapist since I guess January of 2005 and did a little more schooling those first couple years. But then life gets busy. I worked, I got married, I had kids, I got divorced. And then a couple years after that I took a deep dive into the fascia world. I went to my first myofascial release course in 2020 and found a new passion. And so that’s, I guess kind of catches us up to where we are today.

Kevin Patton (00:04:04):
I had been thinking about how we teach fascia and the fascial system in the typical undergraduate A&P course for a while now. And I mentioned this to you, I had been collecting a couple papers and jotting down some notes. Because I wanted to do an episode about fascia that is what we’re thinking about fascia these days. And that is rapidly evolving as we’ll find out during this conversation and what does that mean for the typical undergraduate A&P course? What is it we can do with that to help students understand the human body better? And not only that, I mean this is a foundation preparing for many of the students are going to be going into clinical applications as you did, Kate. So, what kind of preparation can we give them? What initial thoughts about fascia can we give them? So, I had been thinking about that, and as you and I were reconnecting, you brought up the idea of like, “Hey, did you ever think about doing an episode on fascia?” And I’m like, “Funny, you should mention it. Yeah.” And so let’s do it. Let’s do it together. And here we are.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:05:17):
Well, I think my conversation with you started with, “Hey, can we get a chapter in your anatomy book about fascia?” So, I think I got a little ahead of myself, but yeah.

Kevin Patton (00:05:28):
Well, yeah, I mean I remember that that’s how that conversation started off. And that’s a good question. On the practical side, our editors are pushing us, and this is true of all textbooks, not just A&P textbooks and across different publishers and so on. They want us to make our books no bigger than they are now. And if possible, make them a little bit smaller. Because those A&P books now, they’re I think they cause problems with fascia by having to carry them around and stuff.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:06:03):
Those printed textbooks get heavy. Yes, they can contribute to lots of low back pain.

Kevin Patton (00:06:08):
See, there you go. I literally, well, I think people who know that I do the Krebs cycle thing.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:06:16):
Oh.

Kevin Patton (00:06:16):
Krebs cycle thing, yeah, thank you. They will believe me that every time we start a new revision on a new edition of our textbooks, I always ask, can we put wheels on them like they do with luggage? The students won’t have to carry them around and they laugh, but I’m being serious. We need to do something. But I think it’s already happening. The solution is digital textbooks.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:06:47):
Yes. I’m so jealous of my students that get to carry their textbooks around in their devices. It’s so much better ergonomically.

Kevin Patton (00:06:56):
Right. And they can have it with them anytime. So, if they find some time to review some stuff that they didn’t anticipate and they’re somewhere way far away from their study materials, then well, no, they aren’t way far away. They’re just a couple of clicks on their device. And there you go.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:07:16):
Exactly. I still love a good old-fashioned book though. I like to flip through the pages. And actually a couple years ago I started teaching A&P at SLU and it was not even two to three weeks into the semester. And even as a teacher, my textbook looked the same as back when I was a student. I dripped coffee all over the top of it at some point in time.

Kevin Patton (00:07:36):
All right, well, but that shows that you’re using it.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:07:38):
That’s right.

Kevin Patton (00:07:38):
So, we all like to see that, right?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:07:42):
Yes, yes.

Kevin Patton (00:07:43):
So, anyway, here we are in our episode about the fascial system about fascia. And I guess the best place to start is because this is kind of, well, as we’ll see, it’s kind of a little bit muddy, is what is fascia? And I’ve been using the term fascial system. So, what’s fascia and fascial system? I don’t know, Kate, you want to start us off on that?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:08:07):
Yeah. I love that you refer to it as the fascial system. That’s something that took me a while to wrap my head around it. I’ve been enthusiastic about fascia for a couple of years now, and the fact that there could be this whole other system that … the body, it just was hard to wrap my head around. But I do believe it’s way more complex than we’ve given it credit for in the past. I think in the textbook that I use with my students, I think there’s two lines describing fascia. They say something like it’s a dense irregular connective tissue. We describe it, we define it in the chapter on tissues, but actually the past couple of years we fit my lecture about fascia. We slid that in during the muscle structure lecture is where we have been presenting this information. And that might be a good place for it too.

(00:09:04):
Because the muscles are heavily influenced by fascia, and the fascia is heavily influenced by the muscles and the motion and the trauma that it can occur to our muscles over the years. But I think I’m getting ahead of myself. Physiologically that fascia is comprised of collagen, which will give it its support, give the body support, give the body shape and stability. It’s comprised of elastin, which can give it that dynamic flexibility. And then we have the ground substance. And the ground substance will provide the cushion and that surrounds each cell in the body, which can help determine its physiological functional capacity. So, that ground substance, that’s important that surrounds every cell and it’s in each of our cells. And I’ve read some literature that talks about how there’s even fascia going down into the cell as a part of the cytoskeleton, not just giving our full body some structure, but also helping to provide some structure at the cellular level as well. It’s pretty interesting stuff.

Kevin Patton (00:10:18):
Yeah, that’s one of the things that really intrigues me is that connection. And I think that’s where, I mean it seems to me being sort of an outsider looking into the world of fascia, that seems to be like an area where we’re really expanding our understanding and that is all that connection. As a matter of fact, in my textbook, I use a similar definition that you just recalled from the textbook you’re using. But I want to read it because a couple of things in there. There’s a few sentences long, but maybe three or four sentences long. But I want to read it because a couple of different things in there that I think I want to at some point in this episode bring up and discuss.

(00:11:05):
And that’s one of them, that connection. So, what my book states right now in the 11th edition of A&P, “Fascia is always some sort of fibrous connective tissue and almost always features many collagenous fibers that are interwoven in an irregular arrangement. In some areas of the body, for example, under the skin fascia is mostly adipose tissue. In other areas, such as around some of the muscles, it is dense, irregular, fibrous tissue. Often some of the fibers of fascia extend into the tissue of nearby organs, thus strongly binding to them. For convenience, anatomists often distinguish between superficial fascia, which is just under the skin and deep fascia, which extends well into the body and surrounds muscles, blood vessels and other organs.”

(00:12:01):
And of course, fascia comes up in many other areas. And circling back to that mention you made of, we need a chapter, a textbook chapter on fascia. What I’ve been doing in our book, and maybe a chapter is a good solution and maybe we can get to that point. We have to figure out what other stuff to take out to make that fit. But something we’ve been doing, we’re working on actually the 12th Edition, the 11th edition is out there now, but we’ve been trying to integrate it and that is working pretty well because fascia really does come up in a million different places.

(00:12:38):
As a matter of fact, I ran one of those articles I saved, it was from a clinical anatomy journal, and they had a special issue on fascia, and I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. But one of the papers in that special issue was about, it was by Rebecca Pratt. I wrote down her name, so I’d remember that to give her credit for this idea, she wrote an article called Educational Avenues for Promoting Dialogue on Fascia and a lot of what she was doing in that article … And I highly recommend it’ll give us a lot of good ideas. She even had some demos that you can do in a class to really give students a good understanding of fascia. And I’ll mention those in a second. But she goes through the different areas, say this can come up in many different areas of the course.

(00:13:26):
So, Kate, you were talking about, well, in the textbook it comes up in the discussion of tissues. But the way you folks tell your story at St. Louis U, it works better for the students and their understanding when you talk about it in the discussion of muscles. And so she goes through all those different ways that can come up. And so what we’re trying to do in our book is find some of those places where it’s appropriate to mention fascia again and say, remember fascia and how it connects. Well, here it is, connecting again.

(00:14:02):
And I just want to mention too, that a previous episode I mentioned, I think it was called, and I should have this written down somewhere, but I’ll have a link to it in the show notes, but it was something like 10 things we often forget to tell students about cells. And that was one of the things I mentioned is that cytoskeleton connects to the extracellular matrix and that extracellular matrix is part of the fascia and connects to all those other things that we consider to be fascia and part of the fascial system. So, I tell my students that I’m overstepping a little bit, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but one way to think of the body as not as separate parts that are all stuck together, let’s think of it as one giant part and it just has different regions.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:14:48):
I love that you bring that up. Because that was something when I went to fascia class the first time to just stop dividing the body into these micro-diagnostic little pieces. But to look at it as one fluid organism and that fascia is what connects it all. Now you talk about where can we mention this in class? Well, my students are probably sick to death of hearing about fascia. Because I bring it up all the time and I am always making that clinical connection to them.

(00:15:23):
So, I’m a fascia enthusiast and they hear a lot about fascia and I’m hopeful that I teach for the Department of Clinical Health Sciences. So, my goal in this is to give them more perspective about not just fascia, but how it relates to every system and then what a fascia therapist could do for either their future patients or for themselves. Because I do believe that every person could benefit from some fascia work, but we can get into that a little bit more when we talk more about the clinical aspect of fascia treatment. But I talk about fascia almost every week, because it relates to every system in our body.

Kevin Patton (00:16:03):
I’m thinking. And now that you can take or leave this bit of unasked for advice, but if I were you, I would consider having your students, whenever you mentioned the term fascia, to yell out, “Yes, fascia, we love it.” And then-

Kate Oland Galligan (00:16:22):
A little whoop, a little cheer or something.

Kevin Patton (00:16:24):
Yeah. And then that’ll keep them listening for the word.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:16:30):
That’ll carry on your tradition. You know what, I think I’m going to have to do that.

Kevin Patton (00:16:35):
All right, well if you do let me know. I want to hear that that goofiness is living on beyond my teaching career.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:16:48):
Oh, the goofiness resides in my classroom whether I like it or not.

Kevin Patton (00:16:52):
Well, that’s good. That means a lot of learning is going on. These students are engaged. So, cool.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:16:59):
I hope so. That’s the goal.

Kevin Patton (00:17:00):
Let’s take our first brain break.

Fascia Mini Lesson

Kevin Patton (00:17:07):
Hey, you may already know this, but I have another website called lionden.com, and that’s a website I built in the way olden days before our college had its own website or were even thinking about having a website. But I knew that I wanted to jump into it and have some resources available for my students to help them learn A&P, not only resources that I put together for them, but links to other resources. And it could be edited on the fly in real time so that they could have the latest information that helped them with my course as it existed at that very moment. And that website’s still around. I still have outlines that my students used to help guide their learning. These are, oh, excuse the phrase, skeleton outlines. They’re very sketchy and they don’t include the things we were doing in the lab course, only the things we were doing in the so-called lecture part of the course.

(00:18:10):
And so there are big chunks of things missing, obviously because we were focusing on them in the lab. But you might find them helpful. You might want to point your students to one or more of them, or you may want to adapt them to make some skeleton outlines that the students can use to kind of act as a framework for what they need to be learning in your course. So, they’re there if you want them. And there’s lots of other resources at lionden.com too, such as some of my old slides. Many of them are animated. Word lists and lab lists and just all kinds of stuff. So, you can go exploring around there. But the reason I’m bringing it up now is that there is something there called a mini-lesson. These were sort of adjunct outlines where they outline things that weren’t in the textbook, and so therefore they’re just slightly more detailed than they would be for the material that covers stuff that they could also read about in their textbook.

(00:19:09):
So, one of the mini-lessons that I have there is on the fascial system, so you may want to take a look at it. Now, what you would do is just go to lionden.com and I think it’s fairly easy to navigate, but then again, I built it so it would be easy, right? In my mind. But you may not find it so. And if you run into problems with that, let me know so I can make them a little bit smoother for your average user. But anyway, at the very top of every page there’s a navigation ribbon. And so you just select learning A&P and go down to the choice that says learning outlines. And then in that sub-menu right at the very top is something called list of outlines. So, click on the list of outlines and you’ll easily be able to find the one on the fascial system.

Rip That Fascia Out!

Kevin Patton (00:20:01):
Fascia, oh my gosh. Yay, fascia. Let’s not do that during this episode. That’ll get-

Kate Oland Galligan (00:20:08):
It will get real [inaudible 00:20:08]-

Kevin Patton (00:20:08):
Yeah, that’ll get annoying.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:20:10):
Like a drinking game, take a shot every time we say fascia. We won’t get through the episode.

Kevin Patton (00:20:14):
Those of you that are listening, keep that in mind as an option. You can do the drinking game part. Wow. Now you might not remember anything we talked about, so I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, but it’s an option. All right, so oh my gosh, there’s so many things to talk about fascia.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:20:35):
I had a little bit of an idea, because you mentioned a minute ago that we’re getting all this new clinical application about fascia, and I have my little spiel that I give clients because I educate my students and then I have my own fascia private practice too. So, I have a little spiel. Are you ready for it? Do you want me to give you my-

Kevin Patton (00:20:56):
Sure.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:20:58):
… little fascia spiel? Okay. So, I do feel very passionate about trying to educate so many people about clinical aspect of fascia. And I think people initially are a little hesitant. Why is this girl so excited about something I’ve never heard of? And she’s telling me it’s one of the most abundant tissues in my body. Why haven’t I heard about this? Well, when I first attended classes, which I just want to real quick give a nod to John Barnes, I go to the John Barnes School of Myofascial Release.

(00:21:28):
So, a lot of the ideas and concepts that I bring up, this is all information I’ve learned from him and his instructors. So, I just want to make sure to give a nod to the people who educated me because I know that they’re the ones who planted this seed of enthusiasm for me. But what John talks about and what I identified with in that very first class is a cadaver with fascia. We learned about the body initially for hundreds of years through dissection of cadavers. And in a cadaver that fascia, you don’t see its function at all. It’s dehydrated tissue. And I have a clear memory of being in gross anatomy and Jeff Watson coming in, he taught gross anatomy to me and my classmates just, oh, we got to get that fascia out of the way and just kind of grabbing it and just pulling.

(00:22:24):
He had to use a lot of force to try to rip that fascia out. And there were times when trying to get the fascia out of the way, trying to use the scalpel was just not cutting it. It’s very thick, very fibrous, strong tissue. But again, I think from that perspective, we saw how it holds everything together, holds it in place, and how that might allow things to slide and glide a little bit better. And that was the basic understanding I had until recently. And I guess it’s been maybe I’m guessing 30 to 40 years ago when in the medical world and the scientific world, we started to be able to study living tissue with in vivo technology, in vivo cameras. This isn’t horribly new information. As I was glancing through the papers prepping for today, making sure I had information straight in my head, I was kind of taken aback by the fact that some of this information that I am using in my clinical practice comes from studies that were done in the sixties and the seventies.

(00:23:34):
So, this is some information we’ve had for a while and we’re just now really able to take that information and apply it in a way that pertains to clients. And again, I’ll get to the clinical aspect again in a second. I’m sorry. I went off on a tangent about fascia and how we learned about it. In one of my classes, we saw this pretty awesome video, and I think you can find it on YouTube. It’s called Strolling Under the Skin. Strolling like you’re going to take a stroll or a walk. Strolling Under the Skin. It’s about a 25-minute video that really you get to see a lot of living fascia and how it moves in the body. They talk about how they were discovering how fascia worked and the fractals and it’s really fascinating.

(00:24:21):
So, if it calls to you to take a peek, I don’t know that you have to watch the entire thing, but just I think getting a glimpse of, I think I share a two-minute clip of the video with my students in my lecture just to see how the fascia works in the human body, I think is fascinating. You can see how it breaks apart and comes back together again. Which I don’t know, Kevin, I don’t know of any other tissue in the human body that does that.

Kevin Patton (00:24:47):
Only in science fiction.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:24:49):
Right? Yeah. It’s kind of like watching science fiction for the nerdy type, I guess. So, this is information we’ve had for about, I don’t know, 40, 50 years. And now that we get to understand it and know that it doesn’t just hold things in place, but it helps communicate between the different systems of the body as well. I tell my clients it’s a head to toe 3D web of connective tissue and literally it’s a 3D web. And when you get a restriction in your fascia, a one-inch restriction can put up to 2,000 pounds of pressure on the surrounding tissues. So, that can cause problems.

Kevin Patton (00:25:35):
Wow.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:25:35):
Right?

Kevin Patton (00:25:35):
That is crazy. That is something, yeah.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:25:39):
Ouch, right? And that’s actually, that’s information out of a paper that was published in 1961 in Kyoto. So, we’ve known that for a while that fascia can wreak havoc. And sometimes where that restriction is that’s going to be where you get your symptoms. But if you recall, I mentioned it’s a 3D web now when you’re trying to picture that, one of the analogies I use with my clients is think about a hand knit sweater of each stitch in its place. And when that gets snagged, the snag is of course where you notice the changes in the stitching, but it changes the tensile property of the entire sweater.

(00:26:23):
And so often when you have a restriction in your fascia, the symptoms may not be right where that restriction is. So, one of our sayings is honor the symptoms, but look elsewhere for the cause. So, again, this is where I had to change my mindset of what this is where they’re hurting, but that could be coming from a totally different location. So, we have to think about the human as one entity, not all these little subdivided joints or parts or systems of one entity that all works together.

Kevin Patton (00:27:00):
I don’t want to put you on the spot, but can you think of an example of some symptom happening in a specific area of the body where the cause could be pretty far away from it?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:27:13):
Absolutely. So, I have a story about a client, and I’ll share that in just a second. But then something that’s very common that tends to shock people is, one of my favorite locations of the body to work on, one of my favorite areas to work on is the cranium, the head, the neck, helping people with migraines, headaches, or TMJ. And when people call me, I usually try to have a conversation with clients before they come in, just because fascia work is a little different than traditional physical therapy. So, I want them to know what they’re getting into. But when we’re talking about their TMJ symptoms, I always like to prepare them that there is a direct correlation between TMJ dysfunction and pelvic imbalances.

Kevin Patton (00:28:04):
Wow.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:28:04):
Right? So-

Kevin Patton (00:28:05):
Wow. Yeah. Okay. You got to tell me how that works.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:28:13):
Well, I’m a little biased. I believe that everything starts with the pelvis, and most of us don’t have a completely 100% balanced equal pelvis. But if your pelvis is off, if you have an upslip and one hip is riding higher than the other, well that’s going to just cause problems above or below that chain. Now actually, and this is something I’ve heard, this is not something I’ve researched, but I’ve heard that if you can watch one of those videos of embryological development where they speed it up, so you get to see what happens over time, that if you watch the pelvis developing and the jaw developing, it’s almost as if they mirror each other. So, there’s some sort of connection and whether it’s just if your pelvis is imbalanced and that throws everything off, and then the jaw that’s kind of got that hook mechanism. If one side isn’t working as balanced to the other side, that’s going to cause strain and pain. So, I think it comes from the pelvis and what’s level, what’s riding high, and how that affects things up chain.

Kevin Patton (00:29:30):
Yeah. Wow.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:29:31):
Yeah, so that’s a theory. It’s something that there’s definitely a correlation that’s been proven and why that is I think we still need to look into that little bit.

Kevin Patton (00:29:42):
Sure.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:29:43):
Yeah.

Kevin Patton (00:29:43):
Well, isn’t that kind of the state of fascia in general anyway, is that we’re now in a stage of learning? For me, that’s one of the more exciting aspects.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:29:55):
I think I got-

Kevin Patton (00:29:55):
[inaudible 00:29:56] about fascia is like, wow, we didn’t know that. Now we know this, and here’s three things we need to know.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:30:03):
Yeah, absolutely. I am really excited to get into this work at this time. There’ve been teaching classes through John Barnes school for I think 20 to 30 years now. But at first it was kind of seen as taboo and this new way of thinking. And anytime there’s a new way of thinking, I think people are skeptical. So, it’s becoming more and more accepted. I don’t have to deal with some of the scandals or whatever that were happening at the beginning of this practice, but as I was reading through the articles, so many of them say, well, we need to have more research in this area. We need to have more research in this area. As a clinician, I went to class, I bought into it, and I started practicing right away and seeing really great improvements with my clients. I believe in it. And so many of us that are doing this work are clinicians.

(00:30:56):
So, trying to figure out a way to bridge that gap between clinicians and scientists or turning some of these clinicians into a little bit more of the research scientists and doing more clinical trials, I think we’ll learn a lot. So, we have a lot of theories and we’re getting some success with people feeling better and how that works or we need to do more work on that. Well, so I mentioned, you asked me to talk about stories or examples of where you can have a restriction in one area, but symptoms in another. And I wanted to share a story. This is one of the classes I went to, I think it was the fascial pelvis class I went to, and the instructor was sharing a story about one of his clients who came in, I can’t remember how many years. She’d been having pain for years, debilitating pain, couldn’t work.

(00:31:44):
She was having this pain, and I’m talking to fellow A&P professors or anatomy enthusiasts. So, I can just say her pain was in her mastoid process, kind of an odd place to have debilitating pain, but it was just she couldn’t think. When you have pain, it makes it hard to think and function and it’s exhausting. So, anyways, she shows up in his office and it is skeptical. She’s seen all the people to try to help her. And so he says, “Okay, you know what? Let’s try this.” And he puts her on the table and he has her laying on her side. And again, that cranium-pelvis connection, he started working on her quadratus lumborum and her pelvis, and she immediately kind of freaked out, “Oh my gosh, what’s going on?” He said. She said, “Oh, I can feel that.” It’s hurting in her painful area, in that mastoid area.

Kevin Patton (00:32:37):
Wow, okay.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:32:38):
Yeah. And he said, “Oh, should I stop?” She’s like, “No.” She said, “All the people who worked with her before, they immediately go to that painful area and work on that area to no avail.” And it didn’t change her pain, didn’t make it better, didn’t make it worse. So, she was okay with the fact that this work was making it worse, because she recognized there was some sort of connection. With fascia work, sometimes you’re going to get a little bit increase in pain, and that’s therapy, any PT. Sometimes there’s a little increase in pain before you get better. Well, so ultimately jump ahead a couple more years. That patient in particular, she got better and she became a licensed massage therapist, and she started attending myofascial release classes and she’s now a myofascial release therapist.

Kevin Patton (00:33:24):
Oh my gosh. Wow.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:33:26):
Right?

Kevin Patton (00:33:26):
All right. Yeah, I’ve heard of stories and I love these stories when people get some relief through some clinical procedure or clinical approach and it intrigues them so much that becomes their life’s work. It’s so heartening to see that sort of thing happen. But that is, I mean, that’s an amazing situation where, I mean, who would think unless you know this kind of approach, but I mean not knowing that kind of approach, it would never occur to me to start looking elsewhere for pain related to the mastoid process. I would think it’s got to be in the head and neck area.

(00:34:10):
It’s got to be there and only there. And if it’s anywhere else, it’s just coincidental. It’s not really related. But then we see, yeah, it is related. And it does seem, I mean, when things like that, when there are successes like that, it seems it’s unbelievable. I mean, it’s literally unbelievable. Do you run into that much with patients where they’re like, what in the world is going on here? Why are you looking at some other part of my body to treat rather than where I said it hurts?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:34:50):
It happens all the time. It happens all the time. So, when clients come in, I usually tell them that little fun fact. Our thought process or theory is to honor your symptoms, but look elsewhere for the cause. So, when people come in, I usually say, you’re having pain in your neck, and that’s where I’m going to start today. Because people want to feel better where they hurt, right?

Kevin Patton (00:35:11):
Sure.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:35:11):
But also, I want to give you the heads-up, I might be looking other places and maybe next time you come in, we’re going to really work on balancing your pelvis even though it’s your shoulder that’s hurting. But just, gosh, I guess I have a client I’ve seen, I think now three or four visits, and she came in, her primary complaint was in her SI joint, and I think on her second visit I really dug in into a scar that was in the right lower quadrant and her SIJ pain was on the right. And I can’t remember if it was a hysterectomy scar or a C-section scar. It might’ve been both, but that scar tissue on that right side, when I really worked on it, she came in that very next visit saying I cannot … she was amazed at how much better she felt. She couldn’t believe it.

(00:36:02):
Her pain was on the posterior side. I worked on the anterior side, but she got so much relief. And those scars, I think scar tissue for the most part is just overgrowth of fascia. Those fibers, collagen and elastin fibers could grow together to hold us back together. And that’s important. We need to heal, but if we allow them to grow unchecked, they can cause a problem, especially in that pelvic region. There’s so many sensitive structures in there that can be really affected by scar tissue. And that’s an area of the body too, where I think people are amazed with how treating that area physically can provide relief. I think anything in the pelvic region, in the abdominal region, we automatically jump to medical issues. Is it my gallbladder, is it my kidney? Is it my ovary? When it could be a dysfunction in fascia.

Kevin Patton (00:37:03):
As always, I have some questions. Let’s get to those after another quick break to reset our thought processes.

Get Ready for Annual Debriefing

Kevin Patton (00:37:14):
When the episode that you’re listening to is first released I will already be working on the next episode, and that one is, yeah, you guessed it, our annual debriefing episode where I debrief the previous year in the podcast, we kind of look over what we did, what worked, what didn’t work so great, what we might be thinking of doing for the coming year. And then remember last year and the year before that and the year before that, I gave some predictions what I think is going to happen in the world of A&P teaching. So, we’re going to revisit those predictions and see how well I did with those predictions. And not only that, we’re going to make predictions for next year, for the coming year. And I bet you have some thoughts about what things are going to be like over the coming year or maybe some questions or some anxieties or maybe some excitement about what’s going to be happening over the next year.

(00:38:13):
And I’d love for you to share them not only with me, but with everybody who listens to this podcast. So, why don’t you go ahead and send me a brief audio file that just says, “Hey, this is me and I think here’s something that might be happening, or here’s this other thing that I might be happening.” Maybe have one thing, maybe have two or three things that you want to share with us. So, please do that so that we can hear your voice along with mine and along with some others. Hopefully we’ll have several people. Last year I think we had two or three people that shared their thoughts. So, go ahead and send that in or call the podcast hotline, and you’ll get that at the end of the episode.

The Hip Bone is Connected to the Jaw Bone

Kevin Patton (00:38:57):
I am back with Dr. Kate Oland Galligan, and we’re talking about the human fascial system. So, a couple questions occur to me as outline what’s going on there with that patient you just mentioned. You tell me if I’m thinking along the right lines, or maybe this is one of those areas where we still don’t know what’s happening, at least in detail, but it seems to me like if you have a scar and like you say, they can overgrow, so when you’re doing your therapy with that scar, I’m in my mind’s eye, I’m imagining the fascia loosening up.

(00:39:40):
And we know that fascia can change and actually change pretty rapidly, change its nature like you were saying before, connect and reconnect, disconnect and so on. But also it can become more fluid, less fluid, more stiff, less stiff. Would I be at least thinking along the right lines to think that if you have that scar, it could be that something either in that scar or connected to that scar is kind of stuck and it’s too stiff and it needs to be loosened up? Or am I just making that up?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:40:16):
No, you’re spot on. So, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what happens when your fascia becomes restricted. So, I might have a long-winded answer to your question. I hope you don’t mind.

Kevin Patton (00:40:28):
Oh, that’s okay.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:40:30):
That’s what you’re going through, right?

Kevin Patton (00:40:31):
We love long-winded answers to questions, so go ahead.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:40:36):
Great. Well, so how do these restrictions occur? So, we talked about how a restriction can put up to 2,000 pounds of pressure on the surrounding tissue. Well, restrictions in the fascia can occur through trauma. Now, trauma though, you can have a trauma like we all picture like a car accident or a fall, some sort of injury. But there can also be what I consider microtraumas, and that as a PT, the biggest form of microtrauma is impaired posture. Kevin, that’s it. So, when I say fascia in the classroom, I’m going to have people cheer. And when I say impaired posture, I’m going to have them all like groan. Right?

Kevin Patton (00:41:19):
Okay, good. All right.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:41:21):
There we go. So, we’re coming up with things. So, anyways, but impaired posture, how you hold your body the majority of the day against gravity, that can cause restrictions just by nature. Now, this might be a little easier concept to picture with the muscle. We’re all used to muscles, but the fascia is just, I tell my clients it’s like a passive muscle. It doesn’t create motion, but it is affected by how you hold your body. So, if it’s held in a shortened nature for a prolonged period of time, it’s going to shorten kind of like your muscles or get restricted.

(00:41:57):
And the very commonly impaired posture these days involves forward shoulders, tight pecs, rounded thoracic spine and that forward head, and that can cause a tightness in the muscle and in the fascia. And when that fascia gets restricted and held in that tight manner, it gets dehydrated. So, there’s a lot of water, a lot of fluidity in the fascia. And actually some of the newer articles, and well, when I say newer, I’m talking in the last 10 years, they’re talking about how fascia is actually in a liquid crystalline state. How could it be liquid and a crystal? I still kind of have a hard time wrapping my head around that. So, it’s not completely solid. It has a lot of fluidity to it, but I think of it as almost like a gel like substance. Does that make sense?

Kevin Patton (00:43:01):
Sure. Yeah.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:43:04):
So, if the fluidity is taking out of that, it’s not completely solid, but it certainly isn’t as fluid as it once was. You get this dehydrated fascia that is putting pressure on the surrounding tissues, and when it’s restricted to that level, that high pressure restriction, it makes it impossible for those cells involved in the restriction to function, to receive nutrition, to receive hydration. So, you have this hardened tissue that’s not getting what it needs, and it’s going to stay like that until we work on the fascia. Another one of our little sayings, or, well, one of the sayings I’ve heard John Barnes say numerous times is it doesn’t matter how well you hydrate your body or how good your nutrition is, it’s like pouring water on a stone if you’re trying to change that fascia. It’s not going to change unless you change the state of the fascia. I guess that’s where I come in. You’re ready to talk about how to change fascia restrictions, or do you have any questions about those restrictions?

Kevin Patton (00:44:13):
No, you just answered the question. Well, I was just thinking when you said about what John Barnes says about being hydrated and good nutrition, I mean, that’s exactly where my brain was going was, well, I wonder if making sure you’re well hydrated is going to affect that. And what you’re saying is not directly at least that you still got to work on that fascia before you can get enough water in there.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:44:43):
That’s right. Yeah, I was going to say, so after a treatment, I always impress upon my clients that they need to drink some more water. Once that restrictions released, that dehydrated tissue is going to just suck up hydration, suck up as much water as it can from any source possible. In fact, I had a woman just yesterday get off my table and she couldn’t talk. I said, “Well, I bet your body might be trying to take that fluid into those restrictions we released.” So, I have bottles of water and I encourage people to hydrate well after a treatment.

Kevin Patton (00:45:16):
Then there was something else you wanted to circle around.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:45:21):
Yeah. So, we talked about these restrictions, how the ground substance will solidify, the collagen, it’ll become more dense and fibrous, and the elastin, it’s going to lose its resiliency and the restriction. Well, so what do we do now? Well, that’s when you call up Kate and make an appointment and come in. And so I do work on people’s bodies. I call it manual therapy, because I’m a physical therapist. I can’t say that I do massage, that’s a legal issue, but I describe it as like a medical massage. So, when a client comes in, I do some assessment and I look at strength, flexibility, but primarily at posture. And then I’m trying to, once I get on the table, I use my hands to try to find restrictions. And so once I find that restriction, I’m going to work on that restricted area. What we’ve learned is you got to change that tissue through either compression or stretch or a combination of both.

(00:46:23):
So, there’s certain techniques that I’ve learned using my hands feeling into the tissue, and this is the trickiest part, was learning how to get into that collagenous barrier. And that is, that’s what’s taken time and practice, but you get into the right level and you compress. And then I put my hands, I use my hands to stretch the tissue. Now the tricky part where I really try to educate people, educate my clients, is I have to hold that tissue with that compression and stretch for at least two to three minutes and optimally up to five to seven minutes. And so actually they’ve changed how they teach.

(00:47:05):
It used to be, oh, hold each technique for two to three minutes, and that’s how long it takes for the fascia to release. So, the time part of the technique is important. More recently in the last couple of years, and I think this is just fascinating, we’ve learned that when we hold that fascia on stretch for prolonged period of time, up towards the more like 5, 6, 7 minutes, it stimulates the body to release some of the interleukins. And I don’t remember, there’s multiple interleukins in our body, and I think they’re numbered, I think like 3A or something like that.

(00:47:43):
But the interleukin that gets released is the body’s natural anti-inflammatory marker. I did not know that such a thing existed. In the health and wellness world there’s lots of talk about inflammation and how that’s a big part of most of our chronic diseases is just because we’ve been living in a date of inflammation. And so there’s inflammatory markers that can be measured, but I can stimulate the body’s ability to release anti-inflammatory markers. And I think that is pretty cool.

Kevin Patton (00:48:22):
Yeah, I’ll take some of that.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:48:24):
Right?

Kevin Patton (00:48:25):
Yeah. Wow.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:48:27):
Yeah, and there’s a bunch of research right now. I’ve seen slides in classes and heard case studies of people who are diagnosed with cancer. And cancer in some cases is just inflammation out of control. And so I’ve seen slides of the cells, this is what the slides looked like before this person opted, told their doctor, “Well, hold on a second. I think I want to try this other method of treatment.” And then they’ll go to an intensive treatment at a fascia center. So, there’s two John Barnes Myofascial Release centers, one’s in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and one’s in Sedona, Arizona.

(00:49:12):
And they are more set up to do these intensive type programs where a person goes and gets three to four hours of treatment a day for a couple weeks. So, it’s an investment in your healthcare. So, up on the screen in class, you see the cancerous cells. Okay, this person’s gone. They had their intensive, well, then they had their labs done again. And look, this is what we found. And it’s completely changed. That black, angry cancerous tissue is either no longer present or minimally present. And in the case that they presented in class, they talk about how the doctor didn’t believe it. They made that person come back, I think three or four times before they said, “Okay, I guess your cancer is gone. You don’t need chemo and radiation anymore.” And I think in this case-

Kevin Patton (00:50:03):
That is hard to believe.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:50:08):
Listen, I know. It sounds crazy, I think, and I was skeptical at first too, but I’ve heard several stories like that along the way. So, I think there’s something to this. I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of why we aren’t studying this more, because then there’s not money in it for the pharmaceutical industry or etc. But I think that’s a whole nother discussion we could have.

Kevin Patton (00:50:33):
Yeah. But I mean, it does come back to this idea of how science works. And as you’ve mentioned, or you’ve mentioned outright plus alluded to several times, and that is that science is a progression of understanding. There are things that right now we as a group find hard to believe, are skeptical about. But then years later, because there are people at that cutting edge or bleeding edge, however you want to think of it, that are pushing that and saying, “Well, no, I think there is something to it. Let’s look at it more and more and more.” And then finally it’s like, look, here’s what’s happening. Or even confirming that it has happened even before we get to the point of understanding how it happens or what the mechanisms are.

(00:51:26):
I think it sounds to me like with fascia, and particularly with these clinical applications of what we know or think we know about fascia, that we’re still on that edge and that there are things to be worked out, and there are understandings that we don’t have yet. So, I love hearing about stories like that, and I love the fact that there are people pushing, and you talked about the fascia release approach and how early on it was very controversial, and now it’s more mainstream than it ever was before. And that’s because people kept at it. They didn’t just say like, oh, yeah, well, I’m not going to bother with it then. They actually jumped into it and kept doing it. I’ve had several friends and family who have had various problems with persistent pain that traditional approaches aren’t able to help.

(00:52:26):
And so I think it’s necessary that we start looking in other directions for how to help these people. Because pain, as you know, pain, all of us know that pain can be very debilitating and can actually lead to additional problems in our body. So, we don’t want that pain. At least, I mean, we want a little pain to tell us when we’ve injured something, but I’m talking about chronic pain that really shouldn’t be there.

Kate Oland Galligan (00:52:54):
And listen, you bring up one of my favorite topics pertaining to myofascial release. And so I’ve been a therapist for almost 20 years now, and people with chronic pain, man, it broke my heart that they would come to me, and I was trying so hard to help them and with what I knew how to do back then. But in the past few years, I have just found so much joy in helping people find a pain-free way to live. And so when I talk about chronic pain, some of the more common diagnoses that come up are chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, endometriosis. Those are some conditions that are tricky to treat. And I clearly remember as a PT student, one of my instructors telling me, “Oh, well, we’ll never be able to help them. It’s all in their head.”

(00:53:51):
Man, it breaks my heart now to think that A, if someone taught me that information, and B, I believed it. Because something we’ve learned about fascia, you have to understand is it can’t be seen on any images. Fascia restrictions aren’t seen on x-rays, MRIs or CT scans. So, someone who might have this funny pain or chronic pain, and we can’t find a physical reason on imaging, well, there’s a very good chance that they have some sort of fascial involvement. And if they get to a good fascia therapist, they might start finding some relief.

Kevin Patton (00:54:32):
So, if we can’t see it on currently available medical imaging, which I understand, how do you as a clinician find those areas of restriction?

Kate Oland Galligan (00:54:45):
So, when someone comes in, just like any good PT, I sit and I listen to them. I listen to why they’re here, what they’ve done to try to help themselves. I try to gather as much information as possible, and that’s where I start to formulate thoughts and ideas about where to start. And then the next big step for me is to do a posture assessment. As I mentioned before, how we hold our body against gravity gives me a lot of information. And from there, the posture assessment usually guides where I do strength or flexibility testing, but then I have to use my hands. I can feel restrictions with my hands, and that’s something that took time to learn. I work on my kids almost every day, and even still, they’re like, I’ll be working … Just the other night, I was working on my younger son’s IT band, and I was like, “Oh, that feels really tight.”

(00:55:41):
And he said, “You can feel that.” I said, “Yes, I can feel that.” Because it was tender to him, it was painful to him. And the fact that I could feel his pain is what he said. It was pretty amazing. So, it takes time, it takes practice. I’ve had PT students in the clinic with me, and I think that palpation is one of the … it’s a hard skill to develop. I think especially in society today, we are very cautious before we touch another human being. So, you have to get comfortable with touch, and you have to get used to that aspect of it first before you can develop the skill of feeling the different textures beneath the skin.

Kevin Patton (00:56:21):
I mean, I guess a lot of it comes down to over time and with practice developing sort of a sense of what’s going on in another person’s body. And so you’re using your own senses and your own feeling of pressure and softness and stretch and stiffness and all of those things. And then plus fitting that into these memories of what has happened in other cases and what you’ve learned can happen from your training, which sounds to me like it’s an ongoing process of doing that training. Yikes. I mean, that sounds hard, but-

Kate Oland Galligan (00:57:09):
It can be, it can be. And you mentioned a lot of the different skills that I use to try to decipher where there might be a restriction where a person might need work. And I am hesitating to even mention this word. Because I think science and intuition are opposing forces almost, but in my mind, they’re one and the same. Sometimes that intuition … And then that comes from experience. Things I’ve seen in the past as well as sometimes Kevin, there’ve been times where I’m like, ooh, this person’s telling me they hurt in their shoulder blade, but I’m pretty sure that their psoas is what’s causing the problem.

(00:57:50):
And sometimes I just follow my intuition and that’s how I help people. Intuition and another kind of taboo thought process, it’s maybe not taboo, but something that’s I guess hard to prove is there are theories out there about how fascial restrictions don’t just come from physical trauma, but from emotional trauma and how those emotions can just live in the fascial system, in that fascial restriction and cause problems until we can get there and release it. Now, like I said, it’s something that’s hard to prove. And when I was prepping for today, I was debating if I’d even bring up this concept, but it’s one of those things that I’ve had so many experiences in the clinic where I’ve seen someone have a strong emotional response in relation to the fascial release that I’m doing, that there’s no doubt in my mind there is a correlation.

Kevin Patton (00:58:56):
Yeah. And I would imagine you’re probably pretty sensitive about it, not only in this area, but we see in other areas of therapy and clinical practice and so on, that when there is controversy, when there are some people who think that this is a valuable road to travel down, other people who think it’s just a bunch of hooey and that you’re making stuff up, I think that it’s appropriate to be sensitive about that because of that history. But on the other hand, look at our history of even mainstream medicine hasn’t always had the confidence of everyone, including other scientists, and that there are many things within traditional medicine that were … I mean, we didn’t know about germs until relatively recently in human history. And you can go down the list of things like that. And so I think it’s good to have that criticism so that we are looking over our shoulder and making sure that what we’re doing is appropriate and that we’re trying to find answers and so on. But sometimes we just don’t see what’s going on.

(01:00:08):
Except we see the cause and the result of a therapy and okay, this therapy works. We don’t know why it works, but it works. I mean, antidepressants are kind of like that still of, yeah, some of these work, but we are not sure how they work. They just work. And so we’re trying to tease out how they work, and there are different theories, and then some of those theories get knocked down like, no, no, no, that’s not how it works after all this drug or that drug or whatever. And so when you’re talking about intuition, I think a lot of that is, I mean, to me, and again, I’m making this up, but it fits my mindset, and that is that I think intuition a lot of times is actual memory of stuff, but we’re not conscious of remembering that fact or that feeling that as we’re palpating a patient’s body or something, whatever it is that we’re doing, that things are coming together in our brain in terms of what we’ve learned and what we’ve experienced before, but we’re just not conscious of how it’s coming together.

(01:01:14):
And so we interpret that feeling as intuition. It’s just coming from out of nowhere, but it really is coming from somewhere, and it’s coming from somewhere legitimate. I’m not saying that it’s some unknown force. Maybe it is some unknown force, but we wouldn’t know that, would we, because it’s unknown. But the thing is that there are known things that happen in our brain such as having memories that we are not sure where they came from. And even when I do things like when I’m, I don’t know, applying the principles of the Krebs Cycle.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:01:49):
Oh.

Kevin Patton (01:01:50):
Krebs cycle, yes, that’s it. Then I don’t stop and think about where I learned that or when I’ve run into this before I just do it. And somebody might ask me, “Well, how did you know to do that?” I don’t know. My intuition told me to do that. Possibly could somehow rewind and figure out how I knew to do that, but probably not. And so I think that that intuition really is a powerful thing, especially for people like you who’ve practiced and studied something that you work on all the time and you’re very passionate about. I think that that intuition is expected. You’ve found it to be reliable. So, it’s a thing. I mean, that’s just my take on it.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:02:36):
I am so glad you responded that way. Because I hesitated to even bring up the word intuition. But yeah, I think every human has it. I think in a civilized society that we live in now, I think in some ways that intuition gets squished out of us the way we have to be, like I said, be civil, but I think it’s there, and if you believe in it and explore it, I think it can be a powerful tool.

Kevin Patton (01:03:02):
Let’s take one more brain break.

We’re on Substack!

Kevin Patton (01:03:09):
Wow, this Substack thing is blowing up. Now, a lot of that, there’s a lot of flux in the world of social media. Those of you that are on social media. And if you’re not, leave it that way, it’s probably best for everyone. But once you’re in it, it’s kind of hard to just simply walk away. But a lot of people are walking away from X, formerly Twitter and Facebook and some other very popular social media platforms, and they’re going to things like Bluesky and Threads and things like that. And we’re there in all, well, not all of them, but most of the more popular social media platforms as The A&P Professor. So, wherever you’re at, try and find us. Just put in either The AP Professor or The A&P Professor, the and being the ampersand symbol, not the word A-N-D.

(01:04:06):
One of them is Substack. And the reason that we went into Substack and created an A&P Professor identity there is because of my science and education updates newsletter that comes out about once a week or so, that goes through some headlines about what’s happening in science and education and a link to the story or a story that kind of outlines with that breakthrough or that new idea or that new opinion is. So, I’ve had a newsletter for a long time. It wasn’t originally in Substack, but as the platforms I used one by one were bought up by some other big giant company, I eventually moved to Substack. The thing about Substack is that it is also a social media platform, or at least it’s becoming that. It’s not only a place for people to publish their newsletters in a way that’s easily accessible to everyone, but also it’s a way to share ideas.

(01:05:07):
So, there’s a lot of intercommunication. It’s not just one way flow of information. If you’re looking for a place to go for your social media, there are already a lot of science people and education people on it. There are of course people in many other areas, all other areas of human thought are there too, but it hasn’t gotten to the nastiness and the complexity and the weirdness of some of the other social media platforms. So, you might want to check it out and while you’re there, just search for The A&P Professor and then sign up, subscribe. It’s a free subscription, just subscribe and you’ll automatically get every new issue of that newsletter that I send out. But not only that, you can join the conversation. So, just go to Substack.com, create an identity for yourself, and then search for The A&P Professor. That’s all there is to it. And I’ll see you there on Substack.

Mind-Body Connections

Kate Oland Galligan (01:06:13):
Back to what I was talking about, emotions living in the body. I just wanted to kind of return to that because I just wanted to mention a book that if this thought calls to anyone who’s listening, if any of our listeners want to explore the body-mind connection, the book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. I think it was last summer I read it and I handed out to clients. I mentioned it to my students if they wanted to have further summer reading. It is a fascinating book by a physician who started his career in psychiatry working with the VA, and he walks through different experiments that he’s done to show the connection between the mind and emotions and the body, and it’s pretty fascinating.

Kevin Patton (01:06:59):
Well, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because speaking for me personally, that kind of stuff, I’d like to hear that. And that isn’t scary to me as a scientist. I think it’s very logical that that’s the case. And we’ve known for decades that there are other systems in the body outside of fascia alone, where there are these connections, these mind-body connections, for example, in the endocrine system, and even the different ways that the nervous system works, particularly the autonomic division and the enteric nervous system, and lots of different things in our body that connect in ways that we didn’t think about before. And we later found that they connect to processes that are occurring in our mind and how things are processed in the brain and how that affects emotions.

(01:07:57):
And so we’ve already gone along this path in other ways. So, I don’t think it’s unusual or surprising, at least not to me, when we find that, well, the fascia is involved in this too. And when we think about the fact that the fascia does have some of these sensory properties, they’re involved in proprioception and interoception and pain reception, and we know that the fascia connects into and actually gets into nerves, all those different layers of the endoneurium and the perineurium and all that stuff.

(01:08:36):
I mean, so they’re surrounding the nerves and we know that there’s these connections through the extracellular matrix and the integrins and the membrane of the cells, including nerve cells that are getting down into the cytoskeleton. And that connection is there. But why is that connection there? Well, we already know, at least to some extent, that there’s signaling that happens. And so if signaling is happening in this three-dimensional network that you talked about, that’s from head to toe, well, it seems to me to just be perfectly logical that there’s at least potentially a connection to what’s going on in our mind, including sources of emotions or perceptions of emotions or any of that stuff. And then you in the clinic, I mean, that just reinforces that idea, right?

(01:09:32):
Because you see it happen and not just you, it’s like everybody working in this area, if they’re open to it, if they’re looking for it, if they’re expecting the possibility of it, they’re going to see it too. So, at first, it sounds out there, but when you think it through like that, when you think about, well, how does physiology actually work and what are we learning about the fascia? And even for that matter, what we’re learning about emotions, in our experience of emotions, one thing triggers another, triggers another. So, yeah, that can happen I think. So, I’m glad you brought that up.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:10:12):
Thank you. Yeah. And you say it’s out. Yeah, at first it kind of sounds out there, but then I think I’m at the point where I think, man, maybe this is just too simple to be true. You mentioned about the signaling, and one of my theories is that the fascial system is just a continuation of the nervous system. It’s how we communicate more thoroughly throughout the body, or maybe not just a continuation, maybe they’re just more closely related than we once gave them credit for. And on the same topic, there is a lot of buzz about how fascia is a tissue that can hold memory or tissue memory. Now, in the world that I live in, when we talk about fascia having memory, we talk about myofascial unwinding. And that’s when the body may spontaneously move during while engaging the fascial system and move to the point where it’s, I don’t want to say reenacting, but returning to a position that the body was in at a time of trauma.

(01:11:14):
So, the language I use in the fascia world is myofascial unwinding. In the psychotherapy world, they’re talking about the somatic experience, and I think it’s maybe the same thing or maybe just different perspectives of the same concept. But I think this is again, an area where we need to do more research. And Bessel van der Kolk in his book talks about how bodywork and reconnecting with the body is important for fully rehabilitating from trauma. So, it’s just fascinating theories that we just need to learn more about. And also, I’m excited to talk about it with you because hopeful that this platform is going to maybe reach someone out there that wants to learn a little bit more about this either for their own healing or for the healing of someone in their life.

Kevin Patton (01:12:00):
So, that brings me to a question.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:12:03):
Great.

Kevin Patton (01:12:04):
I know that if I’m looking for this kind of clinical treatment or assessment or whatever, that while your clinic’s about 45 minutes away from me, I could go there, but I could probably find someplace much closer, and all I’d have to do is give you a call and ask you for some advice because you’re in my area. But there are people all over the world that are listening in right now, and so if they’re thinking, I need that, or at least I want to get assessed and see if I need that, where would someone start? I mean, do you have any general advice on how do you find somebody that does this kind of work?

Kate Oland Galligan (01:12:47):
I am so glad you asked me that question, Kevin.

Kevin Patton (01:12:50):
And we didn’t rehearse this.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:12:51):
No.

Kevin Patton (01:12:53):
Totally organic. All right.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:12:55):
Right. Well, so again, I go to the John Barnes School of Myofascial Release. And myofascial release is a technique that engages the fascial system. And there are a couple other schools out there. I actually don’t even, I’m not familiar with them. So, I just want to put it out there that I have my organization that I am a part of is run by John Barnes, who has been doing this work for a long time. John I think is in his mid to late eighties, but he’s still out there doing the good work. So, his website is myofascialrelease.com, so just all one word, myofascialrelease.com.

(01:13:35):
And there’s a lot of resources there. If you’re a therapist wanting to look into going into classes, there’s a seminars section. If you want to read more about fascia, there’s a long list of articles that you can link to. But then there’s also a directory. And so I’ve been doing this work for a couple of years. I actually just got my information uploaded to the directory. So, if you know that you want a fascia therapist, you can go to that directory. And it’s not all encompassing. Not every therapist who does this type of work is listed there, but that would be a good place to start. And I think I mentioned to you before, Kevin, that I am working on another side project. I’m developing, I have a developer, a coder who’s working with me to develop a new platform to help connect clients with the optimal independent healthcare provider.

(01:14:32):
So, this isn’t just fascia therapists. We’re looking to host a platform for what I am calling independent healthcare providers to upload their information and have very thorough search filters, either for services that you’re looking for or conditions that you want to have treated to try to find someone in your area who can help you. And the motivation for that was I took this dive into private practice. I started four years ago, and then two years ago I completely left what I consider a traditional healthcare job. And I just think that if we could provide a way for clients to find people who are doing the work themselves, if you’re going to pay directly to the person who’s giving you your healthcare, I think people will find that they’re going to get better healthcare that way. The healthcare system has just turned into this big box company. For years I’ve talked about some of the companies out there that I refer to as the fast food of physical therapy clinics, and I won’t mention any names by name, and there’s [inaudible 01:15:47]-

Kevin Patton (01:15:47):
I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:15:53):
Yes. And I like to say I know that there’s very good people working there. My profession is a physical therapist. Everyone goes into this profession wanting to help people, but the system can grind that out of you because for various reasons. But those therapists in those fast food clinics, man, they’re being told how many people to see how many units to charge. And to me, that’s not therapy, that’s just a money-making machine lining the pocket of somebody else.

Kevin Patton (01:16:25):
Well, that’s true. In my view that’s true or at least becoming true throughout healthcare. Don’t get me started on healthcare.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:16:33):
Well, right.

Kevin Patton (01:16:35):
But this project that you’re doing sounds amazing.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:16:38):
Thank you.

Kevin Patton (01:16:39):
And are we close to seeing that being ready, or is that still some time out for that or [inaudible 01:16:47]-

Kate Oland Galligan (01:16:48):
Our goal is to launch fully a year from now. The first step is we got to get some providers on board and then start advertising to clients, say, okay, we have this service. So, we’re hoping to get started next year. Again, I’m trying to provide clients with a way to optimize the care that they’re getting. And I’m also trying to help take away some of the barriers to providers out there, because it’s not easy getting started. I didn’t have any business classes. I mean, I’d still kind of fumble through the business aspect of running a private practice.

(01:17:25):
So, I’m not by any means an expert, but if we can take away some of the barriers such as advertising, connecting with clients, building a practice, man, I think people will find that they can get better care this way. So, we’re currently coded to be providing information about physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, I think chiropractors and dietitian. Nope. And talk, psychotherapists. So, that’s a passion project I have on the side. And so it’s going to be, the business is Thrive Anywhere. So, hopefully you’ll be hearing more about that in the next year or so.

Kevin Patton (01:18:12):
Well, keep me up to date and I’ll certainly mention it on the podcast when things are ready. It’s possible that somebody listening right now might be also a clinician who or know someone that might want to become part of that network.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:18:28):
Excellent, thank you.

Kevin Patton (01:18:28):
We do have, as you know, being one yourself, there are a lot of clinicians who are teaching anatomy and physiology, so that’ll be one of your filters. Okay. I have a pain in my leg and I want somebody who’s also teaches A&P. No, that shouldn’t be a requirement, but I bet there are a lot of them out there. I mean, I know there are a lot of them out there.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:18:54):
Sure.

Kevin Patton (01:18:55):
I can think of several physical therapists right now that teach anatomy and physiology.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:19:00):
I got a meeting with my coder this afternoon, and we can make that a filter. The filters are not a problem. We have hundreds of filters for all different kinds of conditions and or services, and that would be nothing to add that in there. And I know I love geeking out with my fellow instructors and professors, so it could be fun to connect in that way too.

Kevin Patton (01:19:22):
Sure. Yeah. All right, well boy, I tell you, Kate, I could just talk all day about this and we almost have.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:19:29):
Yeah.

Kevin Patton (01:19:29):
This has been a long conversation, but it’s such a great conversation because there’s so many different things that came up about fascia and even just getting us more comfortable with this idea of a fascial system. It’s not just the fascia, it’s the fascial system and how interconnected it is within itself, but also within everything else in the body, even down to the cell level.

(01:19:57):
This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate the time you took and all the thought that went into our conversation today, but also the conversation itself and all the … There are a lot of things that came up. So, I am going to have to think about this for a while and digest this and make it available to my intuition so that I can make use of it in the future. And I hope you’ll come back sometime soon, not just to tell us about your project, but there’s so many other aspects of this that we could go into that is really helpful for anatomy and physiology faculty to know about so that we can approach our students and our curriculum in a way that’s going to be helpful to them. So, thanks again.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:20:46):
Oh, thank you for having me. I also could talk about this all day long. I think it’s interesting, and if nothing else, I hope some of our fellow professors out there, if all you take away from this is, hey, I need to make sure my students know that it’s more than just a connective tissue. In fact, I heard this crazy lady talking about how she has made her whole profession around fascia. I mean, it could just plant a seed right there that we have so much to learn about this that I think it’s an exciting field to be a part of.

Kevin Patton (01:21:17):
Well, and someday every A&P book will have a fascial system chapter. So, we’re staking that out as a goal.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:21:25):
We are manifesting that reality in this conversation.

Kevin Patton (01:21:31):
There you go. All right. All right. Well, again, thanks. It’s been fun and we’ll see you again sometime soon I hope.

Kate Oland Galligan (01:21:39):
Kevin, thank you so much. This has been so fun. I really appreciate you.

Staying Connected

Kevin Patton (01:21:46):
I really have enjoyed doing this episode, episode 152. We started off by introducing Dr. Kate Oland Galligan by her recollection of being in my undergraduate physiology course decades ago, and having appreciated the combination of both playfulness and seriousness, a combination I’ve recommended many times in other episodes. Then we jumped right into a discussion of how we often forget the importance of the three-dimensional web of the fascial system in our anatomy and physiology courses. How important it is in our body, making all kinds of connections among regions and systems of the body, and thus enabling the body to function as a whole. As a whole unitary structure rather than simply a bunch of isolated organs. If we think of fascia solely as dried-out leathery packing material that needs to be ripped away during a dissection rather than a fluid, dynamic and responsive network, we may be missing some important concepts that our students will need for a good clinical understanding of body structure and function.

(01:23:10):
And it’s been fun exploring the fascial system’s involvement in mind-body connections. I always get a lot out of talking to people who apply the concepts of A&P in their clinical work every day. And we mentioned a few resources that any of us can use in helping our own students understand and appreciate the fascial system. Those resources and many more are linked in the episode notes in the player you’re listening to right now or at theAPprofessor.org/152. That’s theAPprofessor.org/152. And while you’re there, you can claim your digital credential for listening to this episode, and you’re always encouraged to call in with your questions and your comments and your insights and predictions for the coming year in teaching A&P at the podcast hotline. Just call 1-833-LION-DEN. That’s 1-833-546-6336 or send a recording or written message to podcast@theAPprofessor.org. I’ll see you down the road.

Aileen Park (01:24:39):
The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin Patton, an award-winning professor and textbook author in human anatomy and physiology.

Kevin Patton (01:24:54):
Action figures sold separately.