A forty-seven-year-old woman presented with trigeminal neuralgia of nine years duration. Some medical authorities say that this condition exhibits the most excruciating pain that a human can experience.
She originally presented to her dentist for a routine filling of an upper molar tooth. After an injection gone wrong, she has had a miserable journey.
Her main issues have been pain and vertigo. She has seen countless medical and dental specialists for evaluation and treatment. She had had many unsuccessful sinus surgeries and her tonsils removed to try to mitigate the conditions. As a side effect, her current pain medication creates difficulty in speech, which makes her job as a university professor arduous.
As a general rule of thumb, if a patient has chronic pain, the fascial web is certainly playing a role. Sensory nerves innervate the fascial tissue, and trauma to the web can create pressure of 2,000 pounds per square inch. When this is added into the main nervous sensory center of the head, chronic pain can readily result.
She had a brain cycle of 100 seconds but had severe neck strain. While working with the affected side of her face, I found an unusual strain pattern that started in the area of the trigeminal ganglion, traversed down the neck into the trunk, and ended in the left inguinal area. Since it appeared to be the root of her problem, I repeated this procedure many times.
I hypothesize that, over the nine years, her fascial web has compensated, adapted, and tightened all the way into her pelvic area. I am hopeful that further therapy can free up more tissue to give her significant relief.
If you desire to find the root of the pathology, you need to help the fascial web revisit the causative trauma for authentic healing. I believe that therapists with Gillespie Approach Training must be part of a treatment plan for chronic pain patients.
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