Carpal-tunnel syndrome: caused by chronic contraction

Across the world for the hand of a Princess

For 6 consecutive years in Greece, I was working the spa of a beautiful resort right on the Aegean Sea. I had a great time. You can’t beat jumping for a swim between two massage sessions.
The resort was alternatively oriented and we were a perfect match.

Because of the uniqueness of the Functional Muscle Manipulation, the technique I created and practice for 34 years now, I would get 5 or 6 invitations every summer to different cities of the world, by clients that thought they needed more therapy at their home.

That summer, an Egyptian client asked me if I would fly to Saudi Arabia to help someone he knew, that might be needing me. I said that if some prerequisites are covered, I would be glad to.

The following October, he called me. He told me that the person was interested, she had an extreme carpal tunnel syndrome. The visa was issued in just a week instead of the 3-4 months it takes for that country. So, I guessed, I’m not flying there for some ordinary person.

He asked me on behalf of the Princess how long would I need to figure out if my therapy was having results or not. Would a week do? I said 4 days should be enough, and we could extend after that.

In November 2009 I arrived in Riyadh, S. Arabia. My official Greek name is Georgios. The people at the airport waiting to pick me up were holding a sign saying “Mr Gorgeous Rodafinos”. I didn’t complain about that, and I kept that document as a souvenir. Finally, someone acknowledged my inner beauty.

A life in pain

The Princess was about desperate. She hadn’t slept a night for the past couple years, since her problem would get worse during the night. She had become a day sleeper.

For the last 6 months, every time she tried to go out to dinner, she would end up in a crisis, forced to leave her guests and return home to suffer.

She had a doctor from another country living there and treating her for the past 7 years. His job had come down to administering pain medication. The increasingly strong drugs didn’t really calm the pain anymore.

Before me she had invited 5 big names already, doctors from all over the world. All had suggested wrist surgery.

When I palpated her wrists, elbows and shoulders, it was obvious that the whole brachial nerve was in intense inflammation as she was very sensitive to the slightest touch. I asked: “So, what are they gonna do? Remove the whole nerve?”

Her doctor took me out shopping for a massage table. We set it up and I started treating her. First one was a two-and-a-half-hour session. She was in so much pain that she was restless on the massage table. I was going very slowly and caringly, focused on relaxing her sympathetic nervous system most of the time.

Touching, not allowed!

Another factor that made the sessions difficult was that we were working in the living room, which didn’t have a door. Her servants would enter every 10 minutes to check in on her. At some point I realized that their worry was that being touched by a man who was not her husband, was putting her soul in danger or eternal damnation.

The Princess introduced me to her aunt, one of the ladies living there. That woman never smiled or was polite. She never gave me anything but dirty looks. I misunderstood her role. I thought she was just mean. She was probably more, religious authority.

The morning of the third day, the Princess wasn’t there waiting for me. They told me that she is sleeping, and they didn’t want to wake her up because for the first time in a long while, she slept at night.

She was better and very hopeful. We agreed to extend my stay to a week.

During that session I told her my theory. Conventional medicine named carpal tunnel syndrome ‘the typist’s disease’. They said it’s from wear and tear due to hard work. But the Princess hadn’t worked a day in her life. More recently, medicine added ‘but it can also be a result of stress’.

I told her that often, there is something in one’s life that -to survive it- one needs to constantly struggle. Our sympathetic nervous system, which we don’t consciously control, incorporates that struggle in a chronic defensive reaction of holding our breath (shallow breathing), contracting the muscles of an area of our body and dissociating, becoming unaware of that contraction.

That contraction becomes constant, and eventually painful. It affected the brachial nerve in her case, that runs from the neck all the way to the tips of the fingers and developed a chronic inflammation that she mostly felt in her wrists, and which was only getting worse.

I left her a moment to contemplate what might that be in her life. She opened up, with emotion.
Her status had allowed her the decision not to marry. “I didn’t want to be a slave to my husband” she told me. Because of that decision she could never be intimate with a man in all her life, and apparently, she wasn’t at peace with her predicament. She was crying.

Emotions, mostly those unexpressed ones, can be held in the body through the sympathetic nervous system, and can manifest as chronic muscle contraction, which in turn can pinch a nerve, cause chronic nerve inflammation and result in peripheral neuropathy.(1)

Looks can’t kill, but they can definitely hurt

I helped her see one more factor, that might have to do with her getting worse when out to dinner.

Being a Princess, she was allowed to wear “western clothes”. Being “exposed” to men’s eyes in public spaces where all other women were completely covered, was not easy. She was a self-aware and sensitive woman, being stared at and possibly talked behind her back by assertive and entitled men in the strictest patriarchic environment in the world. She was probably breathing shallow and contracting her upper back muscles even more, when out.

It was a difficult realization to go through and difficult emotions to process. The pain came back shooting down the whole nerve, intensely. I helped her turn on her back and lifted the back of the massage table. She was covered with the sheet, sitting back, crying. I was holding her hand and consoling her, softly massaging her fingers and palm, trying to ease her pain. I was telling her a joke, and she moved from crying to soft laughter, and started feeling relief.

At that moment, her aunt barged in. She started yelling at her for about 10 minutes. When she stared at me, I was glad looks can’t kill.
The Princess was shaken. “She told me that my soul is already in the claws of the devil and there’s no salvation, I’m doomed. Half-naked with a man, who is holding my hand and we both are laughing”, she said. I think I laughed at that and helped her ease up again. But I missed how important that event was.

The next day the Princess asked me to stay for good. She felt even better, and she thought that only my therapy can heal her. That was my understanding too.
She also told me that she talked to the top-ranking person of the country, and he wanted to meet me. Apparently, my financial future would be taken care of if I stayed for some months, let alone years.

I asked her if there was another space we could work in so that we wouldn’t be interrupted. We moved the sessions to her bedroom.
Her traps and neck didn’t feel like concrete anymore, and there was some mobility. After that session we discussed with her doctor, and he cut her medication to half, because now it felt too much.

My last morning there she told me she was feeling about 30% better. She asked me to stay again, and she was intense and emotional.
I had thought about it those past few days. I felt that I couldn’t. No matter how much I needed the money and how much I wanted to help her, I felt I was already suffocating there. The idea that I might spend -not years, like her doctor- but months, there, was unbearable.
I felt her feelings, and those of other women. I also would miss a woman’s presence in my life. Then, I’m also vocal and I would have to keep my mouth shut.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but I came up with a suggestion: What if you let me go for a couple weeks, back to my patients in Greece that need me too. What if you use this time to find someone local for me to train. Then you bring me back. I’ll stay till I train them, so that you will have someone here permanently, to take care of you whenever needed. But till they’re ready, I can guarantee that you will be without symptoms!

She reluctantly agreed. I thought I felt her fear that something may go wrong. She was right. They never called me back. I believe that my presence there was disruptive to how things are.

Let the people breathe!

Currently, there appears to be progress on issues in that country. It may take long.

Wars, dictatorships, religious convictions, sexual oppression, class warfare, a difficult childhood, events of physical and emotional assault, are trauma. They all “scar” the physical body too.

A constant sense of danger in the sympathetic nervous system layers up, keeping the body actively contracted, ready to run or fight. You can’t address trauma, and you can’t address chronic contraction, without understanding the body’s mechanisms of ‘incorporating’, to survive.

Chiropractic, most massage techniques and other therapies fail in that understanding. They can’t go into those deeper layers of defensiveness and touch the sympathetic contraction the right way. So, they don’t convey safety and trust, to let go.

The Functional Muscle Manipulation bridges the gap between psychotherapy and the physical manifestations of emotional pain, withdrawal and trauma. It also works well in tandem with psychotherapy and trauma therapy.
I wish it would somehow also be allowed to work in conjunction with a socio-political reform.

(1)

Radiculopathy is nerve injury or damage to nerve roots in the area where they leave the spine. Although chronic muscle contraction in the area of the nerve root is understudied as a cause of radiculopathy, muscle contraction IS mentioned as a possible cause of nerve impingment. Mayo Clinic: “muscle or tendons may compress a nerve.”
In my experience with the use of the Functional Muscle Manipulation for over 3 decades, almost all neuropathies I treated responded to 100% results (healed), by treating the deepest muscle layers at the root of the affected nerve, without any treatment at all in the peripheral area where the symptoms manifest. In the example of the Princess of this article, the focus of work was between the C5 and T1 verterbrae, with most emphasis on C7, and no work on the wrists. Convincing the sympathetic nervous system to allow the deepest layer of muscles of the spine, multifidus and rotators, to release their tension, has allowed the brachial nerve stemming from those vertebrae to start healing.