Fascia Research 2012: Third International Fascia Research Congress

In October 2007, I opened the First International Fascia Research Congress by noting that the congress was the realization of a dream 30 years in the making. During the 1970s, I completed my residency training in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and the coursework and research training for my doctorate. Those studies taught me to fix muscles, bones, and nerves, and to train new movements and restore function in people with arthritis, stroke, spinal cord injury, amputations, and cerebral palsy (to list just a few). They also exposed me to the underlying principles of physiology, biochemistry, and psychology that guided the clinical treatments. But when it came to connective tissue, all I and my colleagues knew was that, when you heated a rat tail, you could stretch it. There was no other relevant research that I could find. At that moment, three decades ago, I started dreaming of a fascia research congress that would bring together widely separate research disciplines in the service of the clinician. Every year, publications on fascia in Medline have risen: by 2005, they had reached 600 annually from 100 annually in the 1970s. In reviewing this literature with colleagues in 2005 (that is, reading more papers in a month than you want to see in your entire life), we were able to identify some key leaders in the field, and we extended invitations to those leaders to present at the first congress. To our amazement, almost all agreed immediately to come, although some did not at first realize the connection that their research had to fascia, despite their personal use of manual therapies! Those of you who attended the 2007 congress (or who own the DVD set) have heard Dr. Fred-erick Grinnell explain that, despite many years of receiving Rolfing ® Structural Integration, he had no idea that there was any connection between manual therapy and his research until we invited him to be a keynote speaker. The importance of his studies into the shape of the fibroblast cell, which makes up fascia and which can change shape from dendritic to lamellar and back again, is demonstrated in other research presented at the 2007 and 2009 congresses. These related studies show that manual therapies (1) , acupuncture (2) , and stretching akin to yoga (3) all have an effect on fibroblast morphology, demonstrable at the cellular level. Interactions between clinicians and researchers form the basis for …