Conditions We’ve Helped People Through
To keep things simple, here's a small list of body based challenges we at Wake Massage have helped other people AND ourselves through.
Frozen Shoulder - A life-altering, crippling condition where the internal rotators of the humerus (big arm bone) in the shoulder girdle have SEIZED on a varying scale. From lightly painful with movement, to complete lockdown of the arm where even just having the arm still attached to the body hurts.
Events that can cause this condition are situations like: - “I caught myself from falling” - “I had a sports accident” - “I was carrying my second child with my left arm for 12 hours a day” - “I was sleeping (on my shoulder), then I woke up in pain” AND more.
Erb’s Palsey - Frozen shoulder, for the whole arm, since birth. The etiology of the condition is usually from the birthing process. If the baby's arm is pulled to try and extract them from their mother’s birthing canal, this mono-manual condition is likely a result.
Here's a small story of a woman who found hope (for the first time in her life) about her condition when she realized that she could actually THERAPY her way back to having a functioning arm.
After living for 40 years, believing that her arm wasn’t good for anything other than a purse hanger, we discovered how to get it actually working. By mobilizing through manual methods like massage, stretches, static position holds, trigger point therapy, cryotherapy, etc., we began to identify all the other musculoskeletal issues that were a result while unlocking movement, function, and sensation in her previously crippled arm. Unfortunately we couldn't complete our work due to COVID, but that was an awesome experience!
Migraines & Headaches - Varying degrees of pain in and around the head region, largely stemming from tension in the neck and eye muscles, or pressures within the skull like sinus pressure, blood pressure, and breath pressure. Massage conveniently helps with all of these pressures and tensions.
Sinus Pressure - this changes a lot based on the position of the head. During a massage, your head is positioned to encourage the evacuation of the sinuses (when you're face up), and the act of clearing out the lymphatics with neck and head massage seems to also have an effect on helping the sinuses.
Low Back Pain - Caused by chronic loading in disadvantaged positions, as when sitting in a traditional seated position. There are other causes, but this one takes the cake in frequency by far.
Deep Shoulder Pain - Caused from a variety of factors. The shoulder is not only the most mobile (and unstable) joint in the body, it is also the most frequently injured joint. We get tempted to use them for heavy tasks in weird positions, and things happen.
Deep Hip Pain - Often the hips are very difficult to injure outside of high speed accidents, and most folks don't do a lot of high speed things outside of being in a car. For a majority of people this pain is due to chronic tightness in the hip girdle. Could be the hip flexors, glutes, lumbar muscles, legs, you name it. Usually it's at least 2 of these tied together.
Rarely, a condition called a “bone spur” pops up. These usually show after YEARS of chronic tightness in the muscles, and are painful when developed in the hips and other joints. It's what happens when muscles are literally pulling at the bony landmarks they attach to so strongly, and for so many years on end, that the bone decides to extend the tendon attachment site toward the direction of pull, since the muscle tissue won't change.
Sciatic Pain - More often caused by muscle tightness than anything else, this condition is commonly (wrongly) self diagnosed as “sciatica.” Sciatica is specifically a result of the occlusion of a lumbar nerve from misaligned lumbar vertebrae or damaged/herniated lumbar disks. Not from chronic tightness in the muscles of the hip girdle, which, as stated above, is the most common cause of sciatic pain that we've seen.
General Chronic Tightness & Inflexibility - Caused by a combination of factors, we've narrowed it down to 5 primaries: Hydration, Breath Control, Range of Motion, Body Mechanics, and Rest.
Muscle Seizures and Cramps - Caused when the body pitches a fit and defies your every desire for it to behave reasonably, causing you pain and some kind of dysfunction. Requires you to retrain those muscles through various therapeutic means in order to regain control and faith in your body again.
Personal compensations and corporeal conundrums that we've successfully navigated healing and normalizing in our own bodies are:
Poor Posture - Low Back Pain - Tailbone (sacrum) Pain - Jabbing Nerve Pain (ankle and shoulder) - “Knock” Knees (Knee Valgus) - Flat Feet - Instantaneous Positional Numbness - Bilateral Shoulder Instability (dislocations) - Stiff Neck, Charlie-horses (muscle seizures and cramps) - Tension Headaches - Burning pains related to stretching - Inflexibility - And more.
The power to control the programming of our “animal” allows us the liberty to be more fully engrossed in our pursuits without the constant drain of dysfunction and pain. This is the power that I wish to show to the world around, and it starts with my community here in Downtown Portland.
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