Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Bowen Conference 2010

Greetings all.
Hot on the heels of the seminar last month, (which was a great success and has led to being asked to deliver another up in Bristol) This years 2 day Bowen Conference featuring some excellent speakers - among others Robert Schliep (Professor Fascial Research at Ulm University), Tom Myers (Anatomy Trains), and the 'new kid on the block' and for my money the show stealer of the whole conference Dr Lorimer Moseley (Fellow at Oxford - Pain Research). My hat goes off to the main organiser of the conference ( although it involved so many others) our very own Jihan Adem of Totnes, Devon. It must have been a logistical nightmare getting speakers in from all over the world, coupled with the flight ban the week beforehand - well done Jihan!
It is interesting to note that Fascial research which officially only began life in 2007 (although Robert Schliep wrote his first papers on the subject in the late 80's) and at that time was on the cutting edge of medical discovery, has made significant headway in such a short time - to the extent that mainstream health magazines are starting to publish articles on the subject. This coming months Men's Health magazine for example is dedicating a double page spread to fascia, and Robert Shliep's work. Which for all those body builders and fitness folk out there will really put a cat among the pigeons.
Lorimer Moseley's talk on pain and how the human body percieves it was a real eye opener, and his delivery was erudite and detailed yet extremely interesting and enjoyable. One of the key things he put forward was that Pain is entirely subjective, this is not new in itself, as there have been various experiments using hypnosis and suggestion to indicate that the level of pain inflicted can be the same but the persons perception of how much pain is felt can vary significantly. However Dr Moseley's studies indicate something far more exciting. He has found that the brain decides how much pain is felt not simply based on priority or how bad/dangerous to survival the injury may be, but also based on the body's previous experience too. Although like many things this sort of thing seems obvious, but it has far reaching consequences. This is yet another piece of research that bolster the Placebo arguement. The word placebo is often used as a negative, as in its 'just in the mind' and yet as the ancient Greeks believed millenia ago the perception of all things is the mind! Hence this Pain research proves that indeed it really is all in the mind. This is backed up of course by harvard Medical School's recent discovery that every cell in our body has receptors for hormones, this means that in theory you really can have a 'happy cell' or a 'sad cell' depending on how you think or feel. Interesting times indeed!

TTFN

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