More Detail about Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction

If you’ve arrived at this article from a search, you may wish to see the basic article (of which this entry is a more detailed version), first:

Understanding Sacroiliac Joint Pain | Stopping the Pain and Weird Symptoms

(CLICK, ABOVE)




WHO IS THIS ARTICLE FOR?


This article is for you if . . .

  • you have found the information provided both by medical practitioners and “alternative” medical practitioners to be “thin soup” that doesn’t make you feel particularly optimistic about your recovery from sacroiliac joint dysfunction and doesn’t increase your understanding, much, but only leaves you feeling faintly hopeful — hope perhaps tinged with desperation or despair.
  • you have found pain medications inadequate to deal with the pain.
  • you have tried therapies and/or surgery and are still in pain.
  • you want lasting relief and are willing to do the work to get it.



WHO AM I, THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE?

I
am a former sufferer of sacroiliac joint dysfunction and a long-time
practitioner (since 1990) of a clinical discipline whose principles and
techniques I applied to myself to clear up sacroiliac joint dysfunction
in myself: Hanna somatic education.


ABOUT SACROILIAC JOINTS

What Do Your Sacroiliac Joints Do?

 

Your S-I joints allow the walking movements of your legs to move flexibly, through your pelvis (which flexes at the S-I joints), to your trunk. Your S-I joints lend “cushion” to your spine and pelvis, when you sit. If the joints are jammed or the muscles of your pelvis are tight, there’s no cushion and sitting can be fatiguing.

These distortions affect the muscles of the trunk (primarily the back, the psoas muscles, and the quadratus lumborum (“QL”).

What Happens to Your Sacrum in Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction


Your sacrum gets twisted, usually jammed one side forward, one side back. That causes your whole pelvis to twist, the opposite side forward. (More rarely, both sides are jammed forward — more about that, later.) In addition, one side may jammed downward, causing the appearance of unequal leg length — even though the legs are the same length — and the appearance of one hip being higher. You may have heard all this, before, from your health practitioner; now you understand it, better.

Distortions of movement and spine shape may follow, with pain as far as the jaws and down the legs.

The pain triggers muscles of the abdomen to tighten, especially when bending forward or turning over, in bed. It’s often a very delicate situation — as you may have experienced.

Muscular pulls where the legs connect to the pelvis (the psoas muscles, the inner and front thigh muscles, the hamstrings, and buttocks) interfere with walking and add pain. Pulling forces interfere with walking and sitting and affect the S-I joints. In the healthy condition, everything is comfortable; in the unhealthy, jammed condition, there’s strain and pain.

How a Twisted Sacrum Causes Sacroiliac Joint Pain


When a sacrum is twisted from its home position in the pelvis, we call that, “displacement”. It’s out of place. With displacement comes distortion of pelvic shape, which puts strain on ligaments of the pelvis, puts pressure on internal organs, and generates pain. The brain senses those strains and pain, and, as a reflexive response, causes muscular contractions that generate a “gripping” sensation in the pelvis that gets worse with movements such as bending forward to put on socks or flush the toilet, rolling over in bed or attempting to stand up straight. The pain triggers cringing, in which muscles tighten up, potentially anywhere.

Non-spasm pain may radiate from the S-I joints into the pelvis, lower abdomen, groin, or sex organs. One person with whom I worked had a diagnosis of interstitial cystitis (intense bladder pain) — and a twisted sacrum from falls from horses.

Therapists unfamiliar with the bizarre symptoms of S-I Joint Dysfunction may attempt to treat symptoms as if they originate where they appear. Such treatment attempts fail. They don’t address the symptoms at their origin — the twisted sacrum.

A CONSIDERABLY MORE DETAILED UNDERSTANDING OF SACROILIAC JOINT DYSFUNCTION


In investigating sacroiliac joint dysfunction in myself, I came to understand the condition and its causes. At that point, I had an idea of what I could do to correct it: set up ongoing, symmetrical muscular forces to make my pelvis (sacral position) become symmetrical. I was the first “guinea pig”; I developed the exercises, in myself, and refined them based on the effects I felt. Remember — I was qualified to do that, having been in clinical practice, since 1990.

As I stated, earlier, S-I joint pain comes from excessive and unbalanced forces on the S-I joints that trigger muscular reactions. Now, I’ll go into more detail.

Most cases of SIJD start with an accident, such as a hard fall (athletic injury, fall from a bicycle or horse, ladder, tree, or rooftop); I told you what I think caused it, in me. Because the changes of muscular tension from an injury are asymmetrical — meaning, the right and left sides no longer mirror each other, they keep the pelvis distorted. These muscular forces don’t change in any lasting way with stretching because they’re programmed into muscle/movement memory and so reappear, shortly after stretching or manipulation.

The brain recognizes the strains felt in the pelvis as an emergency situation: the integrity of the person’s movement system is in crisis. Brain-triggered contraction patterns follow (as an emergency response) to reflexively stabilize the situation — but it’s a grip, not a correction to pelvic shape because the correct sense of pelvic shape has been lost in the injury. 

The term we use in clinical somatic education is, “sensory-motor amnesia” (S-MA). These muscular contractions are so strong that they hurt and trigger pain-related tightening, throughout the body, but one isn’t in touch with holding them tight because the tightness is “on automatic”. 

Radiating pain follows from the distortion.

Ligaments


What happens to ligaments chronically under strain? They get inflamed. Inflammation is nature’s way of forcing fluids and nutrients into tissue that is strained (or injured) so it can heal. But under this kind of strain, no healing is possible — basically because it is not a “damage” situation, but an ongoing strain-and-irritation situation. Suppressing the inflammation is of no help. The ligaments aren’t the problem, anyway.

Muscles Triggered into Contraction by Injury


Isn’t it true that injuries usually occur from one side, rather than exactly centered at the back or front?

What happens with any injury, then, is that a cringe response gets triggered — a tightening centered at the injured region and radiating outward like the cracks in a damaged windshield — but off-center, and the tightening isn’t just momentary, but commonly lasts indefinitely.

The psoas muscles commonly tighten in reaction to a twisted sacrum. The video, below, tells about the psoas muscles.

It’s common to misdiagnose tight psoas muscles as the problem causing the pain, when the psoas muscles are tightening in reaction to a twisted sacrum. When the sacrum straightens, psoas pain disappears.

TWO VARIATIONS OF S-I JOINT DYSFUNCTION (“SIJD”)



  • Two-sided (bi-lateral) S-I Joint Pain
  • One-sided (uni-lateral) S-I Joint Pain (more common)



Two-Sided SIJD


Bi-lateral (two-sided) S-I joint pain is simpler than one-sided S-I joint pain. Bilateral S-I joint pain involves compression at both S-I joints.

One cause of bi-lateral SIJD is sitting too long, perched on the edge of a chair in a condition of high tension and stress, as at a desk doing work by phone or on a computer. That pattern of tension involves the groin, hip joint flexors and psoas muscles in front, and the back muscles. The combination produces strain on the iliosacral ligaments — and soreness. Sometimes, it can be corrected by retraining the psoas muscles and hip joint flexors — an easy “fix”.

One-Sided SIJD


One-sided sacroiliac joint dysfunction is worse than two-sided SIJD and accounts for nearly all the chronic S-I joint pain I have seen.

Asymmetrical (off-center) muscle pulls and posture place more stress on one S-I joint than on the other.

Symptoms commonly appear at different locations on each side and people commonly mistake the locations of pain as the locations of the problems. Clinicians may also mistake groin pain as a sign of psoas muscle dysfunction, rather than as pain radiating from an S-I joint.



TO GET STARTED IN YOUR RECOVERY, FOR FREE

If
you’re used to exercises or therapies that produce such small changes
that you can hardly tell if anything is different, this isn’t that. With
somatic education exercises, you can feel changes rather quickly
(obvious after two practice sessions). As, your movement and posture
change, the symptoms of SIJD fade out.

To get started with the
program, Comforting Your S-I Joints and to see a statement of the
expected result of each section of exercises, you may enter your
information, below.

Enter where to send “get started for free” emails with instructional video links.

A
quick-response email message will come to your email address requesting
permission to mail to you. Once you give permission, “Getting Started
for Free” emails will come to you with bite-size steps for Unit 1 of
Comforting Your S-I Joints. 

Unit 1 is preparatory for the section of the program that causes
your sacrum position to straighten. Getting started will allow you to
evaluate how well these exercises work, for you, in general.
 
Comforting Your S-I Joints
is a system of movement-based exercises that reprograms muscle/movement
memory. You’ll feel changes for the better with each practice session;
changes accumulate over time. The entire system extinguishes the pain
and restores mobility. 

These exercises got me me back to my life with no limitations.
 

These
exercises are refreshing, not tiring. If you’re feeling too tired to
practice the exercises, practice them and get refreshed.




TO PURCHASE, CLICK THE IMAGE, AT RIGHT
OR GET STARTED, FOR FREE,
BY ENTERING YOUR INFORMATION, ABOVE.













https://somatics.com/page7-consultation.htm


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availability of personal mentoring through the program
with me, Lawrence Gold.


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copyright 2014-2018 Lawrence Gold
This writing may be reproduced only in its entirety,
with accurate attribution of its authorship
and contact information.


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Comforting Your S-I Joints | About The Exercises

Facebook: Lawrence.Gold.Somatics | 505 819-0858
CONTACT: https://somatics.com/wordpress/contact
PROGRAM PREVIEW:
http://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/2014/06/regimen-for-sacro-iliac-iliosacral.html

About the Exercises

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Comforting Your S-I Joints | PROGRAM INTRODUCTION

Facebook: Lawrence.Gold.Somatics | 505 819-0858
CONTACT: https://somatics.com/wordpress/contact
PREVIEW OF PROGRAM
http://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/2014/06/regimen-for-sacro-iliac-iliosacral.html

Comforting Your S-I Joints | PROGRAM INTRODUCTION

Clinical Somatic Education | a New Discipline in the Field of Health Care
https://www.youtube.com/user/Lawrence9Gold?feature=mhee

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Comforting Your S I Joints | Who is This Program For? Lawrence Gold

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CONTACT: https://somatics.com/wordpress/contact
http://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/2014/06/regimen-for-sacro-iliac-iliosacral.html

I recommend this regimen (sequence of exercises) for people who have several of the following symptoms:

  • groin pain that has persisted despite therapy for tight psoas muscles
  • testicular pain or vulvar pain
  • bladder pain
  • deep pain in the pelvis
  • a gripping sensation at the bottom of the abdomen
  • deep pain at the waist in back, on one side
  • pain around the rim of the pelvis
  • pain deep in one hip joint
  • a feeling like a tight wire going down the low back and into the pelvis
  • pain, numbness, or “lightning like” shooting/burning pain at the side or front of the thighs or in the pelvis

The general approach of therapy is to regard the cause of a symptom as being at the location of the symptom. With the symptoms named above, when they occur in combination, that’s not the case. The cause is elsewhere — in this case, from the sacrum being twisted with one sacro-iliac joint being jammed, and sometimes (more rarely) both sacro-iliac joints. The symptoms consist of radiating pain, nerve pain, muscular pain, and unnatural patterns of compression, all of which come from the twisted sacrum.

Addressing symptoms as if their cause is at their location is generally unsuccessful; the successful approach involves correcting the position of the sacrum. Manipulation of the sacrum is a case of “addressing the symptom at its location” and is a limited benefit. Normalizing the muscular and weight-bearing forces that keep the sacrum twisted causes a sacrum to straighten and to resume its healthy mobility. As the sacrum straightens, symptoms decrease and disappear.

Clinical Somatic Education | a New Discipline in the Field of Health Care

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Understanding SacroIliac Joint Pain, Stopping the Pain and Weird Symptoms

This article is about sacroiliac joint dysfunction, also called, sacroileitis, sacral torsion, turned sacrum, sprained S-I joint, sacroiliac joint syndrome, and sacroiliac (S-I) joint pain.

It explains what you need to correct it and it contrasts the correction-approach presented, here, with other forms of treatment in a way that I expect will make sense of them, to you.

It also lists symptoms and contains a link to an article with a more complete list of symptoms and explanations of their causes (that trace back to a turned sacrum).

You can read a more technically complete article, here.

images of pelvis and sacroiliac joints

It may see odd, to you, that many of the symptoms you have — pain in places seemingly unrelated to your sacroiliac joints — come from a turned sacrum.

At the same time, many of these pains are medically un-diagnosable — meaning, no medical explanation can be given for many of them — or the explanations given were educated guesses and the therapy didn’t work. If you’ve had extended therapy for those pains, and therapy for those mysterious pains didn’t help, or didn’t help enough, or didn’t produce lasting relief (common), they weren’t understood or approached, correctly, by the methods used.

WHO IS THIS ARTICLE FOR? 
This article is for you if . . .

  • you have found the information provided on sacroiliac joint pain, both by medical practitioners and “alternative” medical practitioners, to be “thin soup” that doesn’t make you feel particularly optimistic about your recovery from sacroiliac joint dysfunction and doesn’t increase your understanding, much, but only leaves you feeling faintly hopeful — hope perhaps tinged with desperation or despair.
  • you have found pain medications inadequate to deal with the pain.
  • you have tried therapies and/or surgery and are still in pain.
  • you won’t settle for less than lasting relief and are willing to do the work to get it.

WHAT’S IN THIS ARTICLE?

  • symptoms of sacroiliac joint dysfunction
  • explanation of what healthy sacroiliac joints do
  • what happens to your sacrum that causes sacroiliac joint dysfunction
  • a comparison of not-so-successful and highly-successful ways of clearing up sacroiliac joint dysfunction
  • a detailed explanation of how clinical somatic education clears up sacroiliac joint dysfunction
  • a way to get started correcting the condition and ending the pain (CLICK, HERE)

The Simple Explanation of Sacroiliac Joint Syndrome (Dysfunction)

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.”
Richard P. Feynman


Sacroiliac joint dysfunction (SIJD) comes from displacement (misalignment) of the bones of the pelvis and strain at the ligaments that bind the joints together.  

Of the symptoms of SIJD, pain at a sacroiliac joint (at waistline level, in back, two to three inches to one side) combined with groin pain is the most common. I list other frequent symptoms, below.

SYMPTOMS OF S-I JOINT PAIN SYNDROME
Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction

Following are the most common symptoms of sacroiliac joint dysfunction. Many more exist that vary from individual to individual.

  • pain at the groin and waistline, in back, same side – in combination
  • pain around the top rim of the pelvis
  • deep buttock pain, one side
  • reduced ability either to bend forward or to stand up straight

On another page, I list more symptoms grouped by:

  • SENSATIONS
  • SKELETAL ALIGNMENT CHANGES
  • MUSCLE/MOVEMENT MEMORY CHANGES
  • EMOTIONAL EFFECTS
CLICK HERE TO VIEW OTHER SYMPTOMS.

There are a lot more symptoms listed on the VIEW OTHER SYMPTOMS page

If you have two or more of the symptoms listed on this page, you likely have sacroiliac joint dysfunction.

But don’t assume that, from the symptoms. Other conditions can cause many of the same symptoms. Symptoms only suggest where to look for the cause. The way to tell if you have SIJD is by manual examination of your sacroiliac joints — something you can do, by yourself, as instructed in the video, below, SELF-ASSESSMENT OF SACRAL POSITION. If you find one side deeper, that’s it: a twisted sacrum and S-I joint strain.

Follow the instructions. Self-examination involves a simple movement with your hands to feel the region of your S-I joints. Pay close attention to the spoken instructions so you know what you’re feeling for. Don’t guess. Either you can feel it, or you can’t. 

SELF-ASSESSMENT OF SACRAL POSITION
https://youtu.be/5zB1T6fYPLA

By feeling the region of your back described in the video, you can feel ridges on both sides with your fingertips. These are not the S-I joints, but the edges of the neighboring hip bones. Toward the midline (the spinal line), next to those ridges, you feel, and others may see, dimples. Your S-I joints are there. The dimples are easier to find in some
people than in others, but the S-I joints are there, deep to the dimples.

If you can’t tell, you may visit a chiropractor or osteopath to get a diagnosis and to get trained how to examine yourself. If you’re going to use the program of exercises to correct your own SIJD, you’ll need to be able to examine yourself before each exercise practice session to know which side to do.

If you’ve found one side sacroiliac joint deeper(“jammed”), you know what’s going on with you. Good for you. Now, you know what you need: a way to straighten out your sacrum so it stays straightened out. That’s on this page, at bottom.

If neither side S-I joint seems deeper, your symptoms may come from other
injuries — which is good news for you because other injuries are much
easier to clear up than SIJD. Visit the Consultation page to get a free Functional Assessment form. Complete it and return it to me by email for a recommendation.

Causes of a Turned Sacrum

THE SACRO-ILIAC (S-I) JOINT LIGAMENTS ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF S-I JOINT DYSFUNCTION, BUT THE VICTIM OF IT — and the side that hurts is the non-jammed side (contrary to what one might expect).

This Mayo Clinic entry describes recognized causes of a twisted sacrum.

Sacroileitis — Comprehensive overview covers symptoms, causes, diagnosis, treatment of inflammation of the sacroiliac joints. 

ref: Overview – Sacroiliitis – Mayo Clinic

Causes for sacroiliac joint dysfunction include:

  • Traumatic injury. A sudden impact, such as a motor vehicle accident or a fall, can damage your sacroiliac joints.
  • Arthritis.
    Wear-and-tear arthritis (osteoarthritis) can occur in sacroiliac
    joints, as can ankylosing spondylitis — a type of inflammatory arthritis
    that affects the spine.
  • Pregnancy. The
    sacroiliac joints must loosen and stretch to accommodate childbirth. The
    added weight and altered gait during pregnancy can cause additional
    stress on these joints and can lead to abnormal wear.
  • Infection. In rare cases, the sacroiliac joint can become infected.

In my clients’ experience, nearly all cases come from an injury, with far fewer from pregnancy or other causes. Injuries include falls (bicycle, horse, rooftop, skating, ladder, etc.) and motor vehicle accidents with one foot on the brake at the moment of impact jamming the leg into the hip on one side.

Unsuccessful and Successful Ways to Extinguish S-I Joint Pain

Not-So-Successful Approaches

You may be familiar with these approaches.

Two surgical measures used to stop S-I joint pain are radio frequency nerve ablation (“RFA” – cooking the nerve ending) and Sacro-Iliac Joint Fusion.

  • Nerve ablation costs about $2,100 and lasts 9-12 months before the nerve regenerates — making repetition necessary.
  • Sacro-Iliac Joint Fusion surgery costs about $22,000 and has the side effects detailed in the article just below. Neither corrects the problem, but only minimizes symptoms.

Click the image, below, to read the article by Dr. Centeno.

Click for this article by Dr. Centeno.


Skeletal manipulation is another approach. However, because of the muscle spasms triggered by a twisted sacrum, adjustments to the sacrum don’t “take”. Distorted muscular pulls distort the weight-bearing forces that go through the pelvis and distort its shape. Symptoms return or never  go away.

https://youtu.be/K7urk1N5hPU
https://youtu.be/K7urk1N5hPU
The Three Biggest Mistakes Made by People
Trying to Get Out of Pain


Two other approaches have to do with the ligaments that bind the S-I joints — and they’re opposites.

  1. Loosen the ligaments by direct massaging or manipulation. 
  2. Tighten the ligaments by prolotherapy.

If it strikes you as odd that practitioners use two opposite approaches (and not together), it suggests to me that their approaches are “shot in the dark” efforts in terms of something they know about. Certainly, if they were consistently effective, SIJD would not be considered so difficult to clear up.

But the ligaments are not the cause, but the victims of the twisted sacrum, and I’ve quoted the Mayo Clinic article as to causes. Any successful approach should somehow address the condition in terms of its cause, don’t you think?

Another approach, the approach I took and advocate, has no negative side effects, consistently provides lasting relief, and restores full function. I explain it, next.

Clinical Somatic Education

Because the field of clinical somatic education is relatively new and not well-known, I’ll briefly explain it, to you. You may see this page, for more explanation.

Clinical somatic education is a health discipline used to extinguish pain and improve movement. Muscles relax, nerve pain ends, and joints come loose. Instead of stretching, we use a completely different technique that causes a long-lasting relaxation of tight muscles by changing muscular control at the brain-level. It’s called, pandiculation.

Pandiculation: “The Whole-Body Yawn”

Pandiculation is an action pattern related to yawning that has far-reaching effects on muscular control and physical comfort. It’s ideally suited for retraining
muscle/movement memory. Pandiculation is a completely different technique from stretching or manipulation.

DOES STRETCHING “ONE BETTER”

Everyone has experienced pandiculation. The “morning yawn and
stretch” is a pandiculation (but the athletic, warm-up stretch is not, by the way).

Pandiculation is what cats, dogs, and every animal with a backbone does, upon arising
from rest. People call it, “stretching”, but it isn’t stretching; it’s tightening muscles and then slowly relaxing and moving or even shaking (you’ve seen a dog do this movement). Pandiculation can be done in more ways than just yawning or the morning “waking up” stretch.

Pandiculation is essential to reprogram muscles and movement. You need to unlock
something before you can adjust it. Pandiculation unlocks muscle/movement memory, so it can be changed.

My earlier description of the causes of SIJD cites muscular involvement and distortion of pelvic shape. The two go together, as I have explained — but, to put it more succinctly, “Bones go where muscles pull them.” Clinical somatic education addresses the muscular involvement and skeletal alignment.

The system of somatic education exercises I developed to correct my own SIJD uses patterned movements to retrain muscle/movement memory. Changes of muscular pulls cause the pelvis to reshape. These changes can clearly be felt. Again, “bones go where muscles pull them.”

Click on the image, below, to see the entire comment.

screen shot of testimonal by Michelle Knight
 

TO SUMMARIZE:

Compression and twisting forces that converge at the S-I joints cause compression of the S-I joints, strain the S-I ligaments, trigger reflexive muscular contractions throughout the trunk and legs that cause muscle and cause radiating nerve pain (that may be mistaken for spasm) — symptoms that never let up, day or night.

S-I Joint Dysfunction or Sacroiliac Pain Syndrome (the word, “syndrome ” meaning a recognizable cluster of symptoms) comprise a complex collection of symptoms that doesn’t respond to therapy, when addressed directly. The key to stopping the pain is to get the position of the sacrum to straighten.

ACTIONABLE UNDERSTANDING

By now, we can see how the forces of an injury initially distorted the pelvis and how muscular contractions, maintained by muscle/movement memory, have kept the problem in place

That means that we can’t correct the problem in any lasting way by addressing the ligaments. (To tighten the ligaments, as in prolotherapy, misses the point and to stretch or loosen the ligaments may reduce their strain, but doesn’t correct pelvic shape or habituated muscular tension patterns).

It also means that we can’t massage away the problem (have you noticed?). It means that we have to free the person from the grip of cringe response and develop balanced, well-coordinated movement that supports the sacrum properly and induces the pelvis to become symmetrical (“mirror-image the same shape”, right-and-left).

Clinical Somatic Education to Correct Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction:
The Role of Movement (“muscle”) Memory

The medical model, which uses drugs, surgery, and electrical or mechanical devices, generally targets a specific symptom or location of pain, but does not, typically, address muscle/movement memory — even if it does address skeletal alignment, as in chiropractic or osteopathy. Moreover, the medical specialty, “pain management”, is a branch of anaesthesiology; it’s primary approach is to mask or hide pain, not to eliminate its cause.

Unlike the medical model and standard therapeutics, clinical somatic education uses action (movement) patterns not to stretch, but to free — and then re-pattern — the muscular tensions that cause the pain of S-I joint dysfunction and keep the condition in place.

The key term, here, is, “patterns”. Thomas Hanna, in his book, Somatics | ReAwakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health (available at many public libraries and via amazon.com), talks about how those tension patterns form with an injury and the process of ending them and their symptoms.

These changes of muscular tension pattern influence pelvic shape over the long term. It’s an entirely new, brain-muscle-based approach that works without need for stretching, strengthening, or soft-tissue manipulation. Instead, it corrects muscle/movement memory, and thereby gets all of the effects of strengthening, stretching, and soft-tissue manipulation — but in a lasting way.

Somatic education causes no undesirable side-effects, other than occasional, short-term soreness immediately after a practice session and lasting 1-2 hours, or 24-36 hours after a practice session, lasting about as long.


ComfortingYour S-I Joints.

With clinical somatic education, we correct S-I Joint Dysfunction in three stages.

  1. Unlock the Situation. We reduce the tension levels of the involved muscles, sufficiently to unjam the jammed S-I joint to permit repatterning of the forces that keep the pelvis distorted. 
  2. Reshape muscular tension and movement patterns through practice of movement patterns consistent with a sound, symmetrical pelvis and healthy S-I joint function. 
  3. Reinforce healthy, free, balanced patterns of movement — not by strengthening, but by developing better integrated movement habits. These movement habits become second nature and do not require special attention in daily life.
screen shot of testimonal comment from YouTube video

 

Click on the image, above, to see entire comment.

See the section, below, to get started with Comforting Your S-I Joints, for free. It’s free because I expect you to find it effective and to purchase the rest of the program.

 

Comforting Your S-I Joints | A RECIPE for RELIEF

This self-renewal program been well-tested — starting with myself as the first “guinea pig”.  (Remember, I am a trained practitioner of a health discipline to eliminate pain and rehabilitate movement.)  I had most of the symptoms listed. Once I found the exercises worked in me, I published them as preliminary instructional videos and then started teaching them to clients.

I understand why someone might be very cautious about taking an alternate approach to clearing up the problem — and I suspect that you may already have “been the route” with both medical and “complementary medicine” practitioners, to little avail. What I can say is that no one has gotten worse, from this approach, and an overwhelming percentage have gotten better. Everyone I have worked with, personally (I’m a clinical somatic educator practicing since 1990), has been satisfied with the result.

The program consists of a series of somatic education exercises that retrain movement (muscle) memory, done in a specific order.

As in a cake recipe, no one ingredient constitutes the entire recipe, and there are steps of preparation; a somatic education exercise may be viewed as an ingredient and the whole program is the recipe.

Who is This Program For?


The “Gentle Spine Waves exercise” in Unit 1 of the program is such an ingredient and a step of preparation. It’s not expected to relieve your S-I symptoms, by itself (although it works for simple back pain); it’s a necessary step to unlock the situation. What it does is relax the back muscles; this step is one of preparation, not of “cure”.

 

https://youtu.be/-JMk0ANH7c8

HOW TO UNLOCK THE SITUATION:

Unit 1 of Comforting Your S-I Joints is the foundation of the program. Called, “Unlocking the Situation”, it decompresses a jammed S-I joint so that the sacrum can be caused to move by the exercises in Unit 2. You do Unit 1 before every practice session of Unit 2 exercises. Scroll to the bottom to send for instructions to get started for free.

By getting started with Unit 1, you can develop the confidence that you actually can succeed at this program and, as improbable as it may seem, do for yourself what medical professionals and therapists have been unable to do, for you. Structured exercises that retrain muscle/movement memory can do for you what manipulation, drugs, TENS (“transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation” — nerve stimulation through the skin), or surgery, cannot.

After the unlocking, exercises that use pandiculation accelerate changes of muscular (postural) habits. The pelvis starts to reshape and the sacrum, to migrate to a new, comfortable position. With practice, improvements accumulate.

Once the changes have occurred, pandiculation exercises reinforce the new pattern. Job done.

If you’re used to exercises or therapies that produce such small changes that you can hardly tell if anything is different, this isn’t that. With somatic education exercises, you can feel changes rather quickly (obvious after two practice sessions). As, your movement and posture change, the symptoms of SIJD fade out.

TO GET STARTED, at no charge

To get started with Comforting Your S-I Joints click, here.

You will land on the Getting Started at No Charge page, which contains practice instructions and a link to purchase the entire program.
A quick-response email message will come to your email address requesting permission to mail to you. Once you give permission, “Getting Started for Free” emails will come to you with bite-size steps for Unit 1 of Comforting Your S-I Joints.Comforting Your S-I Joints is a system of movement-based action patterns that reprograms muscle/movement memory in a lasting way. You’ll feel changes for the better with each practice session; changes accumulate over time. The entire system extinguishes the pain and restores mobility.

Final words: These exercises are refreshing, not tiring. If you’re feeling too tired to practice the exercises, practice them and get refreshed.

Comforting Your S-I Joints screen image

 
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copyright 2014-2018 Lawrence Gold
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Lawrence Gold is a clinical somatic educator trained in Hanna somatic education, a clinical modality for relief of pain, with two years experience on-staff at a community hospital rehabilitation center in California and with a world-wide clientele for his private practice. If you have chronic pain for a lingering injury, he invites you to contact him for a preliminary consultation, here. Learn more about Lawrence Gold’s background, articles published, and speaking engagements, here.
This article is republished from Full-Spectrum Somatics:
http://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/2011/04/understanding-sacro-iliac-joints.html
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