Connective Tissue.

The connective tissue system, particularly the fascia, provides another fruitful avenue of clinical exploration. Because fascial continuity is uninterrupted from the cranium to the feet, skilled assessment provides a total-body picture of major areas of somatic dysfunction.

From this, regional, transregional, and interregional sprains and strain patterns can provide invaluable information about the body's functioning, especially when considering that all the vasculature, nervous structures, and lymphatics must pass through the various layers of fascia and will be adversely affected by fascial dysfunction.

These fascial patterns underlie the essential motion patterns found in our muscles, bones, and organs. Our habitual postural patterns may only be addressed adequately by working on the level of the fascias as the students of Ida Rolf, PhD, (founder of rolfing, an approach to structural realignment that focuses mainly on the fascias, and a student-patient of an osteopathic physician over many years) will attest. You may thus understand why Dr. Still wrote, “We see in the fascia the framework of life, the dwelling place in which life sojourns”