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Here's The Transcript If You'd Rather Skim!

Hey there, it's Dr. Schiller. Welcome back. We're talking about the six things that worsen pain and disability and can prevent you from healing, from illness, from injury, uh, from surgery, whatever it is. And the last video, the first video we talked about, auto autonomic imbalance. When your fight, flight, freeze system. 

Gets into overdrive or overactivity and all the havoc that can cause with your wellbeing and how it can contribute to pain and other problems. Really important to watch that video, so please go back to that one. You've got an email about it if you're on the email list. And if you're not, you can sign up below this video, so check that one out too. 

Um, we're gonna talk today about nerve muscle dysfunction. You've got this incredibly, incredibly rich neuromuscular sensory system of your body, and we're gonna learn a little bit about it and what goes wrong with it and what you can do about it. So brain, spinal, cord, and muscle.

 This is happening at every. 

Point in your body, every level of your spinal cord is talking to thousands of muscles, and there's a reflex in which they communicate. There's information coming from the part of the brain that says move in certain ways, and coordinates that movement through all the millions of nerves that are involved in talking to your muscles. 

And then there's sensory information going back up to the brain that's telling the brain like where you are in space. Um, And so sensory motor integration, that's what lets it all work. It's an integrated system. This is a look at a spinal cord. And a muscle body. And the important thing is that in this reflex there's also motor information telling the muscle to contract and sensory information with special organs that tell your spinal cord how long your muscles, how tight of the muscles, where are the joints in space. 

Where's your body in space so that you can be in a dark room and scratch your nose without like sticking your finger in your eye. How do you do that? It's coordination and it happens through an exquisite relationship of all these different, uh, systems and sensory and motor and all of that kind of stuff. 

And then you've got reflexes like we just talked about, and those are influenced like by ganglia. Ganglia is like a bun, bunch of nerve cells that talk to each other. And it's almost like they're little mini brains, and you've got a ganglia next to every segment of your spinal cord. There's a chain of sympathetic ganglia going all the way up and down. 

And what that does is colors the reflexes depending on what you're doing. What's your state of arousal? What's your intention? What's your state of health? All of that's in influenced by the ganglia. And there's also ganglia that integrate information from your organs, your stomach, your gallbladder, your heart, your bladder. 

All of this is all communicating together. Your system is one system. The neuromuscular functioning of your body as a whole, and at every level of your spinal cord is [00:03:00] influenced by the way Your reflexes are changed and shifted by these ganglia and it's everywhere. This is like your spine going all the way up and down. 

Here's that sympathetic trunk. Here's those ganglia. Here are all the organs of your body. You're one system. It's awesome. This is how people can be amazing professional athletes. How do you do that? Fly? It's unbelievable. That's why I got into rehab. 'cause movement is so cool. Anyhow, let's keep going. So what happens when it goes wrong? 

Why does your system get dysfunctional? Stuff happens to you that your body tries to adapt to. Frequently, it's trying to protect itself, and that gets stuck sometimes. So the protective responses get stuck in that complex neuromuscular sensory system of your body. And it's like noise in the system. So it's like you're trying to drive a car and it's a thunderstorm and you're going through a construction site and the music's on loud and someone in the backseat's yelling at you to turn left and you think it's right and like you can't, how do you do it? 

There's so much noise. And so that's part of what chronic protective responses do from injury, from illness. And so basically what happens is your entire system, nerve, muscle, organ, ganglia, brain, are influenced by your system's perception of danger and urgency. And when I say perception, I mean it very broadly. 

You've got mechanical things like a painful stimulus or you broke a bone, or there's pressure on you. Or you're upside down. You've got visceral things like inflammatory bowel disease or gallbladder inflammation or an infection, and you've got biochemical things like toxicity or widespread inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, and you've got mental, emotional things. 

The mental emotional things aren't the same. Pathway. They're a bit more global, but they're very relevant. And so these are drawings from a famous, you know, father of somatic psychology named Stanley Kelman. And what he was pointing out to in all these drawings, he did tons of drawings like this. But like, you know, you might be the person who's sort of like got a desk job and things are pressured and by the end of the day, your shoulders are up by your ears and you got a headache or neck ache, or your eyes are tired. 

Like that's a pattern. Of mental emotional responsivity. You might be the person who's got chronic back pain 'cause of the way you're holding your pelvis and squeezing your pelvic floor. You might be the person who's like this drawing who's just like chronically kind of defeated and exhausted and sad and depressed. 

You might be the person who feels guilty, you might be the person who feels prideful. These are postural patterns that might not bother you your entire life, but also can frequently be synergistic with changes in reflexes and contribute to chronic pain. [00:06:00] So how does this stuff matter? Does it matter to you? 

Right. Did your nerve muscle system get confused? That's the question you need to ask yourself. And if you have persistent pain, if you've got chronic stiffness in muscle spasm, pain that started out in one place and spread elsewhere, and especially if you notice how it might be connected to various. Si situations or events in your life. 

Maybe it was a really bad infection or a prolonged hospital stay, maybe a physical trauma, an emotional mental trauma. These things feeding together with shifting your neuromuscular system contributing to patterns of pain. The reason this stuff is so important to talk about is because this is happening like in the software of your body, and it's not happening in the hardware. 

Right. We looked at the hardware, the bones and the muscles and the nerves and all that kind of stuff. But basically it's sort of like the programming is off, and it's not that you have a torn muscle or a herniated disc or a broken bone, and so the cat scan's not gonna show it, and the MRI's not gonna show it, and the blood tests aren't gonna show it. 

A really good hands-on exam shows it. A really good observer who sees. You and sees your posture and sees how your body is aligned or misaligned. That's how I see this stuff in my clinic, and I see people every week who have persistent pain who've done the rounds of physical therapy and multiple courses of anti-inflammatory drugs and maybe opioids and maybe, you know, Lyrica and Gabapentin, whatever it is, and like they're not getting better. 

And they're not getting better because part of what's going on is they got neuromuscular dysfunction. They've got alterations in their reflexes, they're ganglia are facilitated, their joints aren't functioning, and so we get to work on that stuff and then a lot of them get a whole lot better. And for them it's like a miracle. 

So what do we do? How do we actually get better people better in those situations? Here we go, listen up. It's about enhancing joint function, getting the autonomic system to come back to normal, whether it's at the level of the whole system or the level of each level, that spinal cord with those sympathetic ganglia like I talked about, it's getting the reflexes and the coordination back on board, and it's getting central processing meaning like. 

Are you open to moving? Do you feel free and comfortable and safe to move? And so I tend to think about these three M'S and I suggest you do it too. These are like three handles you can get on your system, your mind, body system, and mind body relationships. Your I. Movement or your motor system of your body and your metabolic or biochemical system of your body. 

These are obviously interconnected. It's one system. You are one system, but you've got these aspects that you can access with certain therapeutic self-care strategies or things that you can help with with other people. And so if you're dealing with a chronic pain or chronic illness, think about the three M's, [00:09:00] the original downward facing dog. 

Retraining the movement system. So there's a lot of ways to do that. It's all about neuroplasticity, it's relearning, it's retraining. Nerves that fire together, wire together. We want to undo negative patterns and establish positive patterns. So how do we do that? Well, there's stuff you do for yourself. 

There's traditional exercise is sometimes helpful, weight training, strength coordination, aerobics, cross training, whatever it is. But you know, a ton of people come to me with chronic pain who tried that and it made them worse. And part of the reason is because, okay, you got protective reflex is after that injury or that chronic infection in your leg and all your muscles in your thigh are tight and restricted and your pelvis is, you know, On an angle because of those patterns, and then you try to strengthen it. 

Well, what you're doing is you're putting pain into an overactive pain protection system and frequently you're reinforcing those negative reflexes. You might be building other muscles, but you're reinforcing the negative reflexes, so you work out and then you feel worse. And I see that kind of stuff a lot. 

Some people this helps. Some people have their injury, their illness, whatever it is. They go to simple PT or the gym and they feel better. Great. For a lot of people, not, it doesn't help them, and that's why I'm a fan of mindful movement over the decades and mindful movement is stuff like yoga and Tai chi and Qigong, Feldenkrais, Pilates. 

I teach Tai Chi and yoga because I. I know it and I see how much it works in my own experience and, and also seeing how it helps other people. The fundamental principle of all these mindful movement approaches is that you're not going up against the barrier of your protective responses. You're learning to move in a gentle, soft way when you get to the barrier. 

Maybe you meet it and you breathe and you relax and you let that reflex quiet down. Or maybe you go around it and you activate the complimentary motor patterns that cause the  reflex to re relax and release. So you're working with your body's ability to heal itself and reduce those reactive protective reflexes and turn on the normal movement patterns. 

One of the things about yoga and Tai chi that I love is how integrated they are, that they work your body's. Integrated movement patterns from your feet up into your arms and your trunk. It's like your one system. Healthy movement is not just like exercising one joint at a time. People always talk about isolation to strengthen muscles, and if you want to build big, not functional muscles, isolate. 

Yeah. If you want to build supple, effective, smooth, graceful, muscular movement ability, then work the whole system as one unit. Because you'll be reinforcing those primordial reflexes and patterns that positive, good movements made out of. 

So there's also stuff that's done to you, and I want to just highlight the difference between skilled physical therapy and basic physical therapy. I've had so many people come to me and say, Doc, I got chronic pain. Yeah, I tried physical therapy. It doesn't work. Well, what'd they do in physical therapy? 

Bottom line is they did the basic stuff that like someone learns in physical therapy school and I. I'm not a big fan of that. When you've got chronic pain, when you've got chronic pain, you should see a skilled physical therapist who has been training, who's been developing mastery, who knows how to put their hands on and diagnose the joint dysfunction and the neuromuscular dysfunction, and the reflex and ganglia dysfunction, and the hypersensitivity of the body, and even the hypersensitivity of the human being. 

'cause that stuff is super important. And if you don't address that directly, you probably don't recover. And so, so many of people will come to me. Physical therapy doesn't help me. Okay, this is not physical therapy like you did. This is great physical therapy. And they go to see my colleague who's a great physical therapist, and they're like, wow, she really [00:13:00] helped me, or he really helped me. 

So it's a whole different world. So you want to find someone really good. And that's like a neuromuscular training thing. Then there's also the manual hands-on thing, manual treatment, whether it's a PT or an OT or massage therapist. I trained with osteopaths. There's also great chiropractors. These are hands-on techniques for healing and reestablishing normal joint function and resetting the reflexes and resetting those ganglia and the autonomic system systemically and at every spinal level, and that's how these things heal. 

The mind body system really important 

if you're worsening illness and pain. Was influenced by a traumatic experience, whether it was a car accident or an emotional or mental trauma, whether you were in the hospital as a patient experiencing repeated physical trauma, which would surgery and procedures, and  in an unknown place where you don't know people and you're scared and you think you're sick or, or even if you're in a hospital like. 

Witnessing your parent or your sibling or family member or friend's illness process, that creates a traumatic pattern in the in the mind and the perception, and that influences your entire neuromuscular system. If you don't clear that stuff, you might not recover. And clearing that stuff is gonna free up your system. 

It's gonna enable you to enhance your learning process, and it's gonna enable freedom of movement by reducing that restrictive pattern. So what? Mind body techniques make sense? Well, it depends on you. You know, some people get a lot of benefit from C B T, but I'm seeing people who didn't and, and my perception is that C B T is great on your thoughts and your actions. 

It can help a lot if you have pain and trauma, but it doesn't necessarily get at the root. Emotional limbic and core physiologic systems, and there are body-based  psychotherapy techniques, you could call it somatic psychotherapy or body-oriented psychotherapy that in my experience, often have a deeper healing response to actually release the neuromuscular and motor systems so it can function more effectively. 

And so that's a whole different ball game than C B T. Visual imagery can be really effective for some people. Okay, so the last thing we're gonna talk about is like your biochemical system. 'cause your nerve muscle coordination system depends on your biochemistry. And so like, The important things are relaxing your muscles and reducing irritability, your muscles and your to, and reducing inflammation and supporting your neuro neurologic system's. 

Ability to learn. That neuroplasticity we talked about, it's about neurologic health. It's about calming your mind so you can actually do the movement and retrain your system like we talked about. And depending on your situation, that could be meds, it could be supplements, it could be diet. All [00:16:00] of these things are really relevant to helping your nervous system and your muscle system be healthy. 

So these are part of what helps you heal. So what we talked about was how. Miraculous is your neuromuscular system and the incredible things that you can do in health. How does it get off the rails from injury, from trauma, whether it's mental, emotional, physical, or biochemical. And we talked about the things you can do with the three domains of your mind, body, your metabolic system, and your motor mechanical system to help that neuromuscular system. 

Heal, retrain so that you can actually function effectively and reduce the pain and get more functional. So I hope this video has been interesting for you. Um, the next video we're gonna talk about the connective tissue system of the body, which is obviously intimately connected with the neuromuscular system, but it's. 

Two separate parts. And um, so if you are on the email list already, you're gonna get an email about that. If you're not sure you are, you can sign up  below. Um, and then you'll get on that list and you'll get those videos too. So thanks again for watching. Hope this has been good for you and take care.