You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.
For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.
No matter what we've been through, we can get better.
Right now, millions upon millions of people are experiencing chronic pain and loss of function.
And right now, we have a mission in front of us to change this paradigm.
There have been entities that have swooped in to try to take advantage of this pain paradigm with looking to mask the symptoms of pain through things like opioids.
And we've seen where that has led us.
Today is all about addressing the root cause of pain.
And it's not one thing.
This is one of the most important messages and takeaways from this incredible interview from today is looking at these four very dynamic aspects of human life physiology, psychology where our pain can manifest from.
And oftentimes it's a patchwork quilt or puzzle that involves these four different things.
And you're gonna learn about today a very, very powerful treatment for pain, for chronic pain in particular, especially if you've experienced injuries or trauma or, as you're gonna discover, even psychological injuries that can show up in our bodies.
And I'm so grateful because I've actually had an opportunity to experience this treatment firsthand.
And my experience blew me away.
And I'm gonna share it during this interview.
But it was something that was so unexpected, something that was so even outside of my character.
What I experienced, I just I'm still processing and putting it into words.
And I'm so grateful because, with this platform and with this community, we are all about sharing a model of what's possible and providing as many tools as possible to add to our superhero utility belt, because life is dynamic, stuff happens.
And oftentimes it isn't just this one trick pony. that's going to suddenly move this issue away.
It's having access to different insights and different strategies and different tools as we go along, so that we are well-rounded in helping ourselves to heal and to continue healing, because healing is a process.
And also being able to share these things with our friends and family, helping the people that we love to get out of pain as well, and to make this a normalized part of our culture, to have access and awareness of treatments when unfortunately, so many people believe that their pain is the end of their story.
It's just there, a lot in life, and there's nothing they can do about it, and nothing can be further from the truth.
And so without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.
Dr Chris Stabian is the founder of Barefoot Rehabilitation Clinic, a premier chronic pain clinic specializing in helping people who've had pain for over six months and have seen at least three doctors or therapists without notable relief.
With over a decade of active practice in the New Jersey, New York region and patients flying in from all over the world, Dr Chris is a visionary advocate for his innovative approach to the treatment of chronic musculoskeletal injuries with his treatment system adhesion release method.
Let's dive into this conversation with the incredible Dr. Chris Stapien.
Dr. Chris Stapien, good to see you, man.
Thank you for coming to hang out with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Of course.
Man, we've got so much to talk about.
And first and foremost we were just talking about this before we even got rolling that both of us are very passionate about addressing and supporting and helping to transform the landscape of pain.
And so many people, millions upon millions of people are suffering in chronic pain every single day.
And it's stealing our quality of life.
It's stealing our aspirations.
And many people are just kind of feeling this cloak of heaviness.
And the good news today is that there are solutions.
And we were talking about many paths to the goal, but oftentimes there are many paths that need to be taken.
And people are coming to you when they've tried everything, when they've seen all the experts, when they've tried all the medications and when they've almost lost all hope.
And the stories, the transformations, the healings that I've been exposed to have blown my mind.
And that's why you're here today.
I want to ask you first and foremost to talk about the landscape of pain.
Because again, I don't think unless somebody is suffering, they realize how severe the situation is and how many people are suffering, because suffering tends to be something that's very isolating.
We can feel like we're in this by ourselves.
So let's talk about the landscape of pain.
When it comes to the landscape of all of this, there are in the United States, I think, 60 to 70 million people in chronic pain, that's about 20 of the population.
17 million or around 6 are chronically disabled, meaning they can't do anything, They can't work.
They can't do the activities that they love.
Chronic pain, by definition, is a problem that other people haven't been able to fix.
And not only I think those 20 chronic pain numbers in the United States is probably low because most people
My definition of chronic pain is even pain that goes away and comes back on some type of recurring state.
People think that chronic is just intense and all the time.
But anything that comes back recurrently is something that is going to continue to show up.
I think it's a massive pandemic, if you will.
And it's causing a lot of suffering, not only for individuals, but for their family, for their friends, for their work communities.
And I'm happy about some of the pathways and the solutions that are being opened up.
And my hope, even in being here, I was thinking, why are you here, Chris?
My hope is that people the, the people at the top of their game who are thinking through these problems the doctors, the scientists, the researchers we need to start to work together more in order to solve some of these problems, because It's a massive problem.
You had an experience of pain yourself.
That was really a catalyst for changing your perspective.
You know you going to a conventional university and then moving on in your education being a football player at a high level and looking for solutions.
So let's start there.
What's your superhero origin story?
Yeah, so one piece of that is that I have suffered especially emotionally with largely depression and suicidal ideation, mostly from the time I was maybe 10 to 19 years old, and then maybe little windows of time in my 20s and 30s.
And when you suffer emotionally in a really bad way, first you realize how heavy life can get.
But then you also realize that once you come out of that, what else is there to do besides to help other people who are suffering?
And when I was younger, I thought I wanted to be either American gladiator, professional football player, a veterinarian.
Those are my choices in second grade.
And then in college, I was playing football and I loved it.
And I thought, you know, I really want to be a chiropractor so I can work with the New York Giants.
And when I was in chiropractic school I already had some minor chronic pains from football and rugby, because I started playing rugby after I couldn't play football anymore as a senior in college.
And then I realized that adjustments weren't helping me.
I thought to myself if these aren't helping me, how can I serve people in a way, take their money and continue to build a life out of that?
I thought I was going to quit chiropractic school.
I was exploring a lot of different options.
My mentor, Dr. William Brady gave one speech at New York Chiropractic College at the time.
And he said How many of you are being taught that you can fix everybody with chiropractic adjustments?
And we were being taught that most of us raised our hands, especially in the philosophy based chiropractic school.
And he said I don't believe that, but I believe that you can help some people better than anyone else is helping them.
And he was talking about the diagnosis and treatment of adhesions.
He treated my psoas in my belly.
My low back pain was better for a few months by then before I needed another treatment.
After that one treatment he gave me and I was hooked and I didn't look back after that.
Somebody very influential for me and somebody who I trust highly.
And we just have a very strong bond because of the way that we think in our life experiences.
And you know, even if we don't talk for a year, it's just like as soon as we get together at a conference, it's just like we just we don't skip a beat.
And that's Mike Dolce.
All right.
Multi-time MMA trainer of the year.
And yeah.
He was suffering to put it bluntly.
Him being a fighter himself, and all the years of abuse really, and all the changes and the really high pressure environments that he's been in.
He experienced a manifestation of pain that was so severe that, as he shared with me, he had to crawl to get to the bathroom, and he did all the things.
He knows so much.
And what he said and shared with me about you was, like Sean, he's the first person to actually help me get out of pain.
If it wasn't for him, I don't know where I would be.
And so that recommendation of itself really just opened my eyes to start to investigate and to look into this modality and how you're treating people.
And before we get into this, focus on adhesions which everybody needs to know about, what you share with me, before treating me, was that this isn't everything.
And that's where I was like, oh, he's a good guy.
There are these four buckets.
Can you talk about those four buckets that can kind of create the puzzle pieces for an individual's pain?
It isn't just this one thing.
We tend to be very focused on one of the buckets, which is structural damage.
But talk about those four buckets.
Yeah.
And I want to come back to Mike's story a little bit, because I asked him if I could share a little bit.
And he was like, please.
But...
From our perspective as adhesion release methods providers, there are four buckets that correlate to chronic pain, maybe even to all health, but it's structural your joints, your bones, your cartilage, your ligaments functional.
That's your strength.
And what we're trying to bring attention to is how much adhesion you have in your muscles, especially around peripheral nerve entrapments.
Metabolic what's the chemical, mineral state of our body?
And then psychological, that's our emotions, our thoughts.
Maybe we can put brain type when they talk about complex regional pain syndrome, those type of things in the brain, stuff that maybe can all go into that bucket.
All four of these buckets matter when it comes to somebody being in chronic pain.
It feels important for people who are addressing chronic pain to have respect and appreciation for all four buckets.
Part of what I am here to do is to bring attention to this aspect of adhesion as a contributor to chronic pain and just how good and how specifically a provider can treat those adhesions adhesions.
But I hear of some people, especially in the pain science field, who say okay, your MRI is completely messed up.
However, there are other people who have completely messed up MRIs and don't have pain.
So therefore your MRI doesn't matter.
I don't think that's fair.
I see other people saying, You just need to strengthen because strength is important.
We just need to move around.
Fully agree.
We need to move around as much as possible, be as strong as possible.
But that's an incomplete story, mike dolce being one.
A good example of that.
For three months he could not work out, he didn't even.
He was scared to drive 90 minutes to see me because he said chris, i don't even know if i'm going to be able to be in the car because of his neck and he's an example of four-time mma trainer of the year he could not work out through his neck pain.
We need to be aware and respectful of all four of these categories.
And, to the extent that we are respectful of all four categories and we have good tools for each of the problems that can go into each one of those buckets, It feels like we have the best possible chance to get as many people out of chronic pain as possible, which means that we're going to be helping people who are suffering.
Whether it's from injury, age-related wear and tear, or even chronic diseases and infections, our stem cells have to kick into action to help us heal.
There's a specific compound that's been identified in turmeric.
That's getting a lot of attention right now for its impact on our stem cells.
This compound is called R-tumorone.
And a study cited in the journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy details how our neural stem cells proliferate 50 to 80 percent faster when exposed to varying levels of R tumorone.
The study concluded that quote.
Our tumorone thus constitutes a promising candidate to support regeneration and neurologic disease unquote.
How powerful is that?
In addition to the remarkable power of our tumorone, turmeric has many other phytonutrients that support stem cell function.
A little known reality is that stem cells act upon inflammation.
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One of the most notable anti-inflammatory compounds ever discovered comes from turmeric too.
That nutrient is called curcumin.
And curcumin is shown in numerous studies to reduce inflammation, including in a meta-analysis cited in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology.
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And, of course, we could take this advice and start adding more turmeric to a variety of dishes, including curries, to scrambled eggs or whatever the case might be.
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And now back to the show.
Man, wow, thank you so much.
And I'm so grateful because I had the opportunity.
Not only did you come to see me, but you offered for me to do this treatment.
And of course, I want to speak from experience.
And just at this current time, I wasn't in any noticeable pain.
I'm just doing my thing and living my life.
But a little over a year ago, I kind of had a... psychosomatic flare up of an old injury, right?
I didn't quote, do anything, but I share with you.
Know a lot of stuff was going on in my life a lot of conditions, people close to me passing away, a lot of life changes.
And I went in, you know, I went in, did a blood draw.
And that was like enough for my, my system, to be like oh no, he's under complete threat and kind of had this referral pain to where an old injury from rupturing a disc years ago was just lit up.
And.
I went and did physical therapy.
I did this kind of standard of care stuff that I know and I got better, but it was still lingering until I happened upon some work that dealt with the psychosomatic side.
And it was like, I read a certain page and I woke up the next day and the pain was gone, right?
And so I know that that psychological piece and that's one of those things where I'd be way more skeptical about if I didn't experience it firsthand.
And so just knowing that that nerve pathway is there, right?
And so that's why I was more open to it of, like you know, I know that there's something that I just kind of activated out of the blue one time.
And so you went, you tested me, you went and you found these spots, like you knew exactly where.
Once I told you about my symptoms from back in the day and after you did the treatment, you know, i got off the table and i was experiencing some, experiencing something, and you and you asked me are you experiencing anything like emotionally right now?
When i got off the table, i was so mad.
I was mad and it just came out of nowhere.
I was so angry, but I was freaked out the fact that you asked me am I experiencing anything emotionally?
Because I don't think my body like I was looking mad, but I wanted.
When I got off the table I wanted to punch through the wall.
And that's just not my personality to do something like that.
And we talked about that and we talked about and this was like a SOAS treatment that you were doing, which is connected to the whole pathway with the lower limbs and all this stuff.
And I share with you what was going on around that time where I had that referral pain and all the mounting things that I was carrying.
And feeling like a little bit of like I'm taking everybody else's mess and I'm helping to keep everybody going.
And I wasn't giving myself space to be angry, to be upset.
And my body was just holding onto it.
And so you know, not only did you address like the nerves, you know the sciatic nerve and stuff like that, but just getting in there and the psoas, which again I had no idea that I was that tender in those areas.
And so like I feel to tell you how I feel right now, I feel lighter.
I feel like I'm breathing a little bit better and I don't want to punch through a wall.
There's lots of walls in here.
I just feel, I feel more like kind of enlightened.
I'm more, I feel a little amused by it.
You know what I mean?
Thank you for that.
Can you talk a little bit about that experience?
Because that's something that's common, which again.
I saw multiple testimonial videos and treatment videos and I'm just like why are these people so emotional?
You know, talk about that a little bit.
Yeah.
I think there's something to people's language when they say you're getting on my nerves.
Specifically in there, I was treating your femoral nerve.
And right above the spot that I was treating, I was probably around L4, L5, it was swollen.
I don't know if you remember I told you that it was swollen and thick.
When a nerve is swollen or irritated it can get two to four X as thick as it would be at another spot.
When people say getting on my nerves, it's interesting to me the correlation with anger.
But there's something about nerves and the storing of emotions.
And part of me treating that spot and also the psoas is some area whether it's because the root sacral and solar chakras are in that area.
And when people have wounds or traumas, from an Eastern philosophy perspective, Fear usually gets stored in the root.
Guilt usually gets stored in the sacral.
Shame or self-worth stuff usually gets stored in here, but also anger is closely tied to the sacral chakra, because that's where desire and boundary can be tied into.
From an emotional standpoint, there are what happens with the chakras, but there's also the fact that when we have traumas, the body keeps score.
What's the best?
Old van der kolk's book that gets stored in different areas and you either push on something in a certain area, bringing attention or awareness, or when somebody gets really still or does some deep breathing, it can allow the body to have some space in order to release or to let go or relax something, And it's not a bad thing.
It's great that you've released that anger.
Sometimes people feel a certain way like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this.
No, the opposite.
Whatever you're feeling is completely valid and true, just like we're supposed to do with our children.
And just let it go.
Let it out.
Trust your body to do what it's doing.
We are finding different ways for the body to release that stuff.
Yeah.
We treat your femoral nerve in your belly, and that's when you got up and you were feeling a certain way.
We also treat your sciatic nerve a little bit at your butt cheek which was inflamed in your hamstring.
But we didn't want to do that today because I didn't want to overload your nervous system.
But what was also great was the way that you were releasing and focusing on your exhales as you're being on the table.
You did a great job grounding your energy in that space in order to process it as well as you could, which I really appreciate too, because not everyone has a good regulation system to be able to do that.
Yeah.
I think part of this in that regulation system and acquiring these skill sets has really helped me to perform at the level that I have, despite what I've been through right
And so you know again, functionally I'm able to do all the things, but there are these little kind of weak points or breaks that I can train around and I could strengthen.
But what if we just remove the cause with our body trying to compensate, right?
And a lot of these compensation patterns are unconscious.
The body, we adapt and we just keep going.
But at some point, you'll probably find that you break down.
And so you're addressing something that is under communicated, under educated in addressing these nerve adhesions.
So talk more about that, because again, this is something that is emerging in the science.
We do have some evidence, but it's one of those things where the evidence is still emerging.
However, The anecdotal data is massive as far as treatment and patient relief, complete remission of pain, and the list goes on and on.
Talk about nerve adhesions and why you're treating that specifically.
Adhesion is made of fascia.
It's connective tissue that surrounds the body, surrounds the muscles ligaments organs tendons nerves, all that stuff.
It's healthy tissue.
And through either overuse or trauma, it gets thickened up and glued up in different areas.
It's kind of like spider webbing.
That's how I picture it.
That's how it feels to me.
It's kind of thick spider webbing that pulls on different things.
And there are plenty of manual therapists who do myofascial work or rolfing or different types of techniques in order to treat the fascia.
What we are doing with our system adhesion release methods is bringing way more precision to that treatment.
Instead of doing an entire rolfing session on somebody's belly, I wanna find the little BB or marble-sized spot of adhesion that is gluing the nerve.
Because when I go to the nerve and I push on it, it should be able to move a quarter of an inch, a half of an inch.
When it's stuck by adhesion, it'll feel glued down and stuck and then there will be pushback on the adhesion when I'm going to treat it.
It is very different than a trigger point or not.
From my perspective, treating trigger points or not will allow a client to leave great, leaving for 24 hours and typically the symptoms will come right back.
Now there will be people on instagram who message us and say well, i got my trigger point treated, my pain went completely, went away Great.
Very happy their pain went away.
Most of the time people say that getting their trigger points or not treated will not be effective or work.
Going back to the adhesion aspect, we believe that adhesion is the most common pathology, musculoskeletal pathology and causing chronic pain in 30 to 60 year olds, especially when somebody has had pain over six months and seen at least three doctors or therapists without relief.
And, by the way, this is how all of our providers market to people on social media and everyone else.
We want everyone to try chiropractic strengthening acupuncture, any of the things that are simpler, because people typically need to walk that road to really see where they might have an adhesion problem.
And usually when they've seen five 10, 20 doctors or therapists, they're going to be more open to the fact that maybe adhesion is causing my issues.
And within that, 80% of the treatment we do is going to be for peripheral nerve entrapments.
That is, nerves outside the spine, in my chest, in my armpit, my arm fingers glute belly thighs feet, wherever.
That nerve is going to be glued down and stuck to the tissue that's nearby.
And when it's glued down and stuck, people will typically be aware.
If they have numbness or tingling, then yeah, I have a nerve symptom.
And if the nerve is really really messed up, their nerve conduction velocity test, or EMG test, will be positive.
But that happens when the nerve is way damaged and obvious anyway.
One of the things that we want to educate people on is when they have restricted ranges of motion or tight tissues.
For example, I got a stinger when I was playing football 21 years old here.
And one of the things that happens when my overuse comes back and I get adhesion in my scalenes right over here.
It starts to feel like somebody's starting to strangle my neck.
Hmm.
And when I get treated, I'll be good for a couple months, and then I won't have that symptom.
So when people have chronic tightness, that stretching is not making them better, not making them more flexible, that is usually a nerve entrapment that has not been identified.
There is a researcher named Jeffrey Bove who has, I think, three or four rat studies where they had rats overuse their forearms for four months or so.
And then they broke them down into different types of groups control groups, rest group, manual therapy group.
This isn't our technique.
This is just manual therapy.
And what they found is that providing manual therapy for the rats after they did this overused better than rest, help reduce the fibrosis and the inflammation around the nerves.
Better than rest.
This is mostly preventing adhesion before the injury has allowed to become really chronic.
But what it speaks to me is that first, When people have symptoms, there is a tissue pathology effect.
That happens.
They found all these inflammatory markers inflammation, decreased nerve conduction velocity, macrophages.
All this stuff happened from them overusing their little forearm paws.
And the median nerve was compromised.
And stuff got better with rest, but not as better as when they added manual therapy to the rest.
And I think that's really important, because a lot of people say that nothing is wrong with the tissue.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Yes, there's stuff in the head that's going on.
Yes, people need to be strong and move around.
Yes, there's also something wrong with the tissue.
In the study you're referring to which again, there's multiple, but one of them was published in the journal Pain and this was in 2019.
And again the data is emerging, and this is why it's so important to really focus on outcomes.
You know, results really do speak for themselves.
And just the fact of you know, knowing that the nerve can be inflamed and thicker as a result at certain spots which again, for me, walking around, I don't see that I have any symptoms.
You know yesterday, for example, on some long flights, I just spoke at an event across the country.
I came back feeling pretty good, you know.
And this particular spot and it's not the same on the other side, but this particular spot you knew exactly where it was.
And it's just like and you could tell that that nerve when you touched it.
It is noticeably different from the other nerve.
And so again, this is so important and why I wanted to have you here today.
We deserve at this point to have access to a variety of tools.
And this information should not be reserved for the few.
There are solutions to our pain.
And as you shared, we've got those four buckets though.
We don't wanna get it twisted.
Chances are you're going to have a percentage of these different things.
And you broke that down for me as well, which I was grateful for, because we tend to put all of it into one bucket.
Like this has got to be the thing.
And so what I want to do is make sure that people have access to awareness about this treatment and access to practitioners, which there are more and more that are emerging.
I just met one of your colleagues today, Veronica, shout out to Veronica in Temecula.
And where can people get more information?
Number one about seeing you, Your clinic and also the network of practitioners who are utilizing this therapy.
Yeah.
My mentor, Dr. Brady, retired in 2020.
I evolved it in January 2023.
Bezos helped me develop the whole system.
Wow.
I did not want to see the way that Dr Brady, from Integrative Diagnosis, developed this evolution of treating adhesions.
Adhesion release methods since January, 2023 were three and a half, four and a half years in or so.
We have about 42 providers across the world.
The reason why I bring this up is it's not nearly enough.
And we have patients flying in from all across the country.
I've had patients flying from Georgia in Europe, from Puerto Rico, from Canada, from Russia.
There's one provider in London.
There's one provider in Australia.
There's one provider in Spain.
I have people in India DMing us all the time.
Where do I go?
I share, because we are desperately in need of really hardworking, intelligent manual therapists who are open to the possibility that adhesions can be treated and removed and we know it because we can feel it immediately after it's gone and the nerve is now moving a quarter of an inch and a half an inch when i bow it.
We're in desperately in need of more people.
So one place people can go if they're a manual therapist and they want to get better results for chronic pain, charge more money, make more income is adhesionreleasemethodscom.
And then for people who are looking for help, our practice is Barefoot Rehab in Denville, New Jersey.
And we're Barefoot Rehab on Instagram.
Or if they don't live near New Jersey and you want to see where one of the 42 providers are, it's wwwfindanadhesionprovidercom, and you can type in your zip code and we'll bring up the closest provider.
And I feel bad.
I feel bad that we don't have more providers across the world.
And I feel myself constantly apologizing to people where a patient will have a friend in this place and they won't have the resources to be able to fly or travel, or we don't have people everywhere.
But my hope is that and i'm very grateful to you sean, for having me out here, because i need to get this work out to more not only the people in pain, but really the providers.
I need them the really good manual therapist to want to take their care to the next level, like that's the bid.
That's the one of the most important limiting factors right now, where this piece of the functional bucket treating adhesions is so that when strengthening is not working, we treat the adhesions first and then they can go back to strengthening and all of a sudden, all the movement and strengthening is going to work, but we need to remove the adhesions first.
Yeah, yeah.
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Now, back to the show.
What's so cool about this time, right now, is that we have more access to education than we ever have, if we're asking the right questions right.
And so, part of this is like seeing is believing and part of the seeing is first seeing, right?
And so, You have social media channels.
You have millions of people collectively who are following you and subscribe.
Like your YouTube channel, I think it has almost a million subscribers, which is crazy.
900, 900.
900,000?
Yeah.
Oh, no big deal, just 100,000 off.
But same thing on Instagram and that kind of stuff.
People can follow you and check out, hear some of these testimonials, get education.
That's another great thing about it is you're sharing education.
You're sharing some of the why behind it as well.
But, if you can, for people who are not familiar with this at all, can you share just a little bit about how this works, because you had Veronica was assisting you today with treating me for example and putting me in these certain positions as you were working on those particular adhesions?
Can you talk a little bit about what's going on there with the tissues?
And yes, break that down for me.
Sure, first piece to this, is somebody's pain typically has to be better or worse with a movement or posture.
Or if it's a chronic pain that goes away for large parts of time but it comes back at certain when somebody does a certain thing, that's a good indicator that their pain is musculoskeletal less of the psychological, emotional bucket, less of the metabolic bucket, more of the musculoskeletal structural excuse me and functional buckets.
So that's really important.
Then our providers are trained to do a history and we get seven first order data points.
And after get those seven first order data points, they come up with a diagnostic hypothesis for what tissue has what pathology.
I share all of this because this is really important to our process.
I said to you a couple of times, you even said it earlier today, This adhesion work is awesome.
If you told me I couldn't get adhesion work every few weeks or every month, I probably wouldn't be treating patients within three months.
I'd probably be out of the game.
I'd be done.
The adhesion work is awesome.
That doesn't mean that we fix everybody.
I've probably referred three or four people to surgery in the past three or six months.
Sometimes people need to see a psychotherapist or refer people to functional medicine.
Part of our job is reality matching.
Here's what I think the different pieces of your problem are.
Are we ready to address the adhesion piece now or later?
What's the sequence of this going to be?
Then, after we decide that we're going to go this route, we do the exam.
We get our provocative tests, our ranges of motion, how the tissue feels, we communicate expectations.
And then when we start treating the adhesions, we basically shorten the tissue.
We put our fingers right where the adhesions are and create tension right in a dime size spot of where that adhesion is, maybe even smaller than that.
And then we use an assistant to lengthen the tissue so that the adhesion, like glue or taffy or spider webbing, is being stretched out.
And then we apply our thumbs most of the time.
Sometimes we use that little metal grip bar that I gave you or radial shockwave to create tension going in the opposite direction to tear that spider webbing off.
And we will typically do four to eight treatment passes per visit.
Some of our newer providers are doing 30 minute visits.
Some are doing 20 minute visits.
Mine are 15 minutes visits long, if people are traveling three or four hours away or flying in.
Sometimes i'll do a double visit for that day.
But we do a test or range of motion.
They bend backwards and they have six out of ten pain, or they go to touch your toes.
How tight is their hamstrings?
Five out of ten.
Treat one or two spots.
Recheck it because it will be immediately better if we're removing something that is a problem.
Now, somebody comes in two or three days later, I expect some regression in their progress.
Two steps forward, one step back.
Not two steps forward, two steps back every time, because then there is no permanent sustained relief.
The idea with this treatment is that people should have weeks to months, to years of lasting relief, when massage or adjustments or acupuncture were only giving them a few days.
By removing the cause of what's overloading that specific tissue, that specific pathology, we are allowing people to have 20 30, 40 sustained relief for days weeks months, years.
And the better we target what is overloading that tissue, the better, the longer of a window of relief that they're gonna have.
And most of the treatment is not for the actual tissue that is pissed off or that is overloaded or screaming out.
Most of it is for the tissue that is causing that muscle, that nerve whatever, to be overworked.
And I think that's really important because a lot of treatment is for I'm gonna massage that muscle that's hurting.
I'm gonna give nerve ablation to this nerve.
I'm gonna kill that nerve that's pissed off, even though it's other stuff that's causing it or it's that disc L5S1 is ruptured.
We're going to do surgery on that disc.
But the thing about mechanics is that it's all of our holistic body that's doing the things that we're doing.
A lot of the relief we're getting for people on that tissue is by treating other stuff.
And we will eventually get to the cartilage in the knee or the low back or the hip or wherever it is.
But what's cool is if you can get relief on a tissue without touching that tissue, you know that you're restoring mechanics, increasing capacity and taking stress off of what is being overworked.
This has put me in the mindset of phantom limb pain.
Because again, this is well-established.
Well-established in medicine having a limb that is no longer there and yet experiencing just chronic pain we can address.
For example, like you mentioned, it might be an l5 s1 disc herniation and then somebody has a sciatic pain as a result.
You go in there, chop that piece of the disc off or, you know, do a fusion.
And yet maybe you get some relief, but most people find that those symptoms still come back, right?
So down the chain, and this speaks to truly, it's not just this one spot.
If that one spot is now gone, like a phantom limb, you can still have pain that's radiating in other places, or a sense of pain.
Your nervous system can still be channeling through certain pathways, even based on just the belief that it's supposed to be there.
And if you're not addressing the real root and also sometimes, sometimes it's not just the root cause, it is addressing some of the little streams that have broken off here or there.
And so really being aware of that, like you said, you can piss a nerve off, Something can get on your nerves down the chain and yeah, you can go ahead and do something upstream.
But what about where the real pain or the inflammation has taken place, or like the nerve getting inflamed and you do nothing and it just that adhesive phenomenon happens?
And so you're really looking at how can we help this person to feel better as a whole person and not just treating this one isolated thing.
And that's what I really appreciate about you.
So and if you could, as we wrap things up, we've mentioned chronic neck pain, we've mentioned chronic back pain and sciatic pain.
What are some of the other things that you guys have found success with?
And I've seen so many of these success stories, but what are some of the other things that you can help people with dealing with pain?
And any musculoskeletal pain.
So anywhere that muscles, ligaments, nerves, tendons and bones live is within our wheelhouse.
Fingers, wrists, forearms, elbows.
I forgot to treat your elbow, I'm sorry.
Your shoulder, toes, ankles, knees, hip joints, chest, ribs, neck, headaches, skull, TMJ stuff.
All of this has tissue that needs to lengthen and stretch.
And if it's okay, if I could just share this too, I think this is an important data point.
Nerves need to be able to stretch nerves need to be able to stretch and floss.
And if a nerve stretches more than 6%, it starts to lose blood flow and become compromised.
If it loses 12% blood flow, it starts to completely shut off.
So that's important to know that the body will protect nerves more than it will protect anything else.
And, like I was mentioning to you earlier today, the deep gluteal syndrome surgery.
You can search this on YouTube deep gluteal syndrome surgery, where they have adhesions neck to the sciatic nerve in the butt cheek.
And there are surgeons who will show you and say hey, there's no, there's no blood in the sciatic nerve here.
Let me cut these fibrovascular bland bands with the scalpel.
And then immediately they'll see blood start to come and profuse through that sciatic nerve, because the nerve is no longer being stretched and it now has slack in the system.
I have a degenerated hip joint.
And when my femoral nerve or lateral femoral cutaneous nerve in the front of my hip start to get adhesed and stuck, I start to limp.
Then when i get those adhesions removed there, the limping will immediately go away and it will stay away until one or two months later when those, when the adhesions, start to come back and then the body is protecting the nerve over my degenerated hip joint.
And this is happening everywhere throughout the body Amazing.
Man, thank you so much for sharing this.
Listen, if we don't wake up to this and again add this to our superhero utility belt, we're really gonna miss out on a huge opportunity for healing.
And I love the reference point of somebody getting on your nerves or life getting on your nerves, like truly.
We tend to focus so much on these isolated things when it comes to our health and when it comes to pain, right.
And so we're just trying to always mask things or manipulate certain spots instead of really looking at the whole person.
And when we're talking about pain, what's often left out of the conversation?
Again, it depends on your framework, but we really attribute it to tissue, right?
And when we do that, I think that we tend to lean into the muscles, right?
And our nervous system is so important in this equation.
It cannot be overstated.
Our nervous system is what is actually controlling what's happening with our muscles and the data going back and forth from your brain to those spots.
And so we've got to focus on having a healthier nervous system, having healthy nerves and nerve expansion.
This beautiful web, this incredible system.
I think about the circulatory system, we got the nervous system, we've got the lymphatic system, we've got all these dynamic, amazing points of expression and access and communication spread throughout our bodies, and all of it needs love.
There isn't a part of us that's just operating in isolation.
And so yes, checking off the boxes of the basics and making sure that we're moving around.
And you've already mentioned that our nutrition, our sleep quality, but also what do we do when things go wrong, and being aware that this is another really important factor and there are solutions.
So I appreciate you so much.
Can you share where people can again follow you like what's the Instagram YouTube, all that good stuff yeah, for people in chronic pain barefoot rehab on instagram, adhesion release methods on youtube.
Or if they're a manual therapist, a pain doctor chiropractor pt acupuncturist, osteopath who's potentially interested in learning this stuff, adhesion release methods on instagram, or learn adhesion release methods on youtube.
And then Also, if people are interested in the little myofascial tool, that's definitely the best myofascial tool in the market.
It's gripbar.co.
And people can treat their hands, their forearms, their knees, their shins, their feet.
I do myself every week or so because I just want to keep my hands and my feet healthy.
Keep those tissues healthy.
Yeah.
My guy, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us today.
It's truly an honor.
Thank you so much for having me.
It means a lot Sean. the one and only Dr. Chris Stapien, everybody.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.
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