Hidden Threads, Part II

This is the second essay on judgment in science. It looks at fresh perspectives on connections in the human body, but it begins with a mystery about what keeps our forests alive.

Erica McCormick had scarcely finished her bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin when she came upon an astonishing discovery. She was only 23 at the time. As part of her work as a full-time research assistant in geoscience professor Daniella Rempe’s lab, McCormick and her colleagues were exploring transpiration, the process by which water moves through plants and into the air, evaporating off of leaves, stems, and flowers. But something wasn’t adding up. The amount of water being transpired was greater than the amount of water in the soil. That excess water had to be coming from somewhere. The question was where.

McCormick and her team showed that plants and trees were actually drawing water from rocks. Their roots spread down to bedrock in search of moisture contained within porous rocks beneath the earth’s surface. We had always thought that plants draw water from the soil—end of story. But McCormick and her team proved that trees are tapping into rocks for a significant amount of their water supply. And they are doing this across a wide range of climates and biomes. Subterranean rocks are serving as wells, nourishing trees and plants with water beyond what soil can provide. It was a fundamental connection in nature that no one had noticed before.

The bedrock water source discovery demands more than a conceptual change. Rather than seeing trees primarily as autonomous entities, we clearly need to view them as parts of a forest whole. In this view, the forest is the entity and the trees are merely constituent parts, inseparably connected to the larger system. But we need to think about these discoveries along with the new awareness of elephant and plant communications that I discussed in the first part of this series. Taken together, they point to the need for a shift in our attention.

Each of these findings reveals that deeply rooted connections have existed without our ever suspecting them. If that is true, then there are likely other hidden threads conjoining complex systems beyond just the flora and fauna of forests. The more we seek those connections, the more we are likely to find, but we won’t find them where we always look. Instead, we’ll need to explore the spaces in between. Take, for example, those within our own bodies.

Inner Webs

Notions of how our own bodies are connected are, of course, not new. Chinese medicine has long conceived of 12 major meridians, sometimes called channels, through which energy flows. Acupuncture taps into these channels to redirect excess energy, or to stimulate blocked energy, and bring the body back into balance. When Dr. Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard University Medical School first published The Web That Has No Weaver in 1983, he wanted to demystify the ancient practices of Chinese medicine for a Western audience. As the practice of acupuncture was slowly being introduced into Western countries, Kaptchuk made it accessible by explaining its extremely foreign concepts in language that readers could comprehend. His task was essential, because even the terminology that Chinese medicine employed baffled many patients unfamiliar with the concepts.

Could painful conditions really be caused by dampness, heat, or wind inside the body? Why would the spleen meridian be affected by stimulating the big toe? How could needles in the ear help reduce back pain? The differences go beyond mere wording. According to Kaptchuk, the entire notion of causation is completely different from the Western approach. Rather than studying causes of illness, acupuncture probes the patterns that enable conditions to arise, examining people as a whole: ranging from their pulse, the condition of their tongue, their lifestyle choices, demeanor and, of course, their complaints. As Kaptchuk puts it, “One does not ask, ‘What X is causing Y,’ but rather, ‘What is the relationship between X and Y?’”

From the meridians that weave the body’s parts into a single being, to the conditions that combine to form disharmony, Chinese medicine views macro-level connections as the key to treating illness. While the Chinese concepts of meridians are ancient, there are newer ways of envisioning our internal connections, though they, too, have only relatively recently become the subject of scientific study.

Our Bodies, Our Views

It has been called quackery and labeled pseudo-science, though its origins are surprisingly scientific. Ida Rolf was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, in what is today Lithuania. Born in 1896 in New York City, Rolf earned a degree in biochemistry in 1916. Though doctorates for women in science were rare, Rolf earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University just four years later. She was offered a research position at the Rockefeller Institute, where she spent the next eight years publishing papers on biochemistry.

Her career might have continued along this path, but in 1926 she moved to Zurich to study physics. While there, she encountered practitioners of homeopathy, who described an entirely different way of viewing illness. Rolf had already been practicing yoga in New York, studying its many movements, and she had had exposure to osteopathy as well. She suddenly found herself seized with curiosity about how these various practices might be combined, as each examines the whole person, not its parts in isolation.

Rolf created what she called structural integration. Her basic premise sounded peculiar to some, perfectly reasonable to others. She maintained that the human body must be viewed as a unit, rather than a collection of distinct parts. And like every other object, it is subject to the force of gravity, constantly pulling us downward. When a house is undermined, she observed, and one side slopes downward, any reasonable repair would require realigning the structure. She could not see why, at least in some respects, human bodies should be considered different.

In Rolf’s view, much physical discomfort could be addressed by realigning the fascial sheets that support the human body. The fascia is a network of collagen, unique in its elastic properties. It can stretch to 10% of its original length without sustaining any damage. It not only surrounds and joins every muscle and bone; it also serves the same role for nerve fibers and even blood vessels. Fascia is what connects us internally. Rolf believed that by applying what she called energy, meaning pressure, to key points of the fascia, she could realign or even add structure to the body. It is a practice that looks similar to massage, and as she wrote in her book Rolfing and Physical Reality, “there was nothing metaphysical about it.”

By the early 1960s, her methods had gained a following, and she was invited to practice at Esalen, the heart of the Human Potential Movement in Big Sur, California. Notable thinkers were passing through this spiritual retreat in the ‘60s. Aldous Huxley, famous for his experiments and writings on psychedelics, was there, as well as Abraham Maslow, the psychology professor, renowned for his hierarchy of needs. Esalen served as a springboard, allowing Rolf’s methods to really catch on. Today, there are an estimated 2,500 certified practitioners around the world. Her association with Esalen, however, might have led her techniques to be seen as fringe, and therefore suspect.

Rise of the Myo-fascists

Then, one of Rolf’s students, Dr. Thomas Myers, built on Rolf’s ideas. Myers claims to have no interest in promoting one method over another. He modestly presents his findings as merely one lens on how the body is connected by the myofascial network. He prefers to speak of the myofascial network, the groupings of fascia and muscle combined, rather than the fascia alone. Like Rolf, Myers also maintains that the body must be seen as a single unit. Though his meridians are different from those used in Chinese medicine, he identifies 12 channels of myofascial lines joining different sections of the body. In his book, Anatomy Trains, Myers provides copious illustrations of how his anatomical schema are laid out.

By way of analogy, consider the structure of a sweater. If you pull on the lower left corner, you might find that the material around the upper right shoulder becomes taut. That kind of connection seems unsurprising. But when we think of problems in the human body, Western medicine has seldom imagined that a pain or dysfunction in one region might have its source in a more distant body part. Myers has developed a way of representing different channels, or trains, of fascial connections. The result is an alternative way of conceiving how movement works and, more importantly, how to treat the body when parts become misaligned.

Myers offers an example of a woman who came to him with neck pain, convinced it was caused by the turning of her head and clicking of the mouse while working at the computer. Massage and other treatments had brought her only short-term relief. Invariably, the pain returned once she resumed work at the computer. Myers used his approach to look for misalignments—examining the way the woman’s entire body moved, not just the head and neck.

He found that her ribcage had shifted to the left, dropping out support under the right shoulder. The ribcage had moved to the left in order to take weight off of the right foot. And this in turn was because the right foot could not support her full weight following a mild skiing injury to her knee three years before. By beginning with corrections to her leg, Myers was able to realign her body correctly, and her neck issues resolved. As Ida Rolf used to quip, “Where you think it is, it ain’t.”

Myers is far from alone. Bands of bodyworkers, scientists, anatomists, and others have become seemingly obsessed with the role of fascia in treating ailments. An International Fascia Research Congress gathers many of them together to share new findings on fascia’s role in our well-being. The advocates are so passionate that they have been called “afascianados,” or pejoratively, simply “fascists.” One enthusiastic afascianado is Gil Hedley, a former theology doctoral student at the University of Chicago, who studied rolfing from Myers and has gone on to dissect cadavers in a holistic fashion. In hundreds of videos available online, Hedley presents the body in ways entirely different from those typically shown in medical schools.

For example, instead of cutting up parts, Hedley removes the outermost layer of skin intact, then the next layer of adipose fat, displaying them as something like a body suit. He gathers our innards all together and presents them as an intestine bouquet. Hedley is so passionate about his dissections that he goes on tours, presenting the body in ways seldom seen. His latest is the nerve tour, in which he has removed the entire nervous system as a complete unit. He wants to show as graphically as possible how the human body is interconnected. He and his ilk are trying to highlight the value of recognizing those connections at a deep level, in contrast to the ways that modern science has typically dissected the body into constituent parts.

Myers, who was once Hedley’s teacher, has written that our whole understanding of human anatomy emerged from the butcher’s tools, later the scalpel, and now the laser. Those tools necessarily led to an emphasis on cutting, dividing, and ramifying of the body. Myers may be right, but a new tool has just led to a stunning discovery—one that confirms the deeper level of connection inside us—another connection we had long overlooked. I’ll explain that and more in next week’s post.

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