As the year is coming to an end, the clinic remains extremely busy. As most of you may have noticed, I am currently completely booked until January 2023. If you need an appointment for November or December, please email me to be placed on the cancelation list with the days and times you are available; I will contact you if I get an opening.

There will be a slight change in January 2023 with your appointments as I will no longer be requiring the COVID-19 pre-screening to be filled out after the holidays. This being said, please continue to inform me if you feel sick or have COVID like symptoms as my protocol will still be to reschedule your appointment due to illness. Masks will continue to remain mandatory until further notice.

As my practice has developed over the years, my focus has shifted more to towards treating different conditions that need an alternate approach. This has led me down the road of studying nerves, how they behave, and what kind of treatments they tolerate best.

Nerves run throughout our entire body stemming from our spinal cord and branching out to go along ribs, downs arms and legs, and to the tips of our fingers and toes. They help us perceive touch, they activate muscles, and they inform us when we are hurt. Pain is one of the most common reasons individuals seek out massage therapy treatment and although manually working on muscles helps a lot of people, a different approach is sometimes needed for some issues that arise.

Nerves are different than muscles in several ways. They aren’t as flexible, they get irritated with stretching, they don’t heal nearly as quickly as muscles, and they hate being compressed. As a Massage Therapist, our primary ability and tool that is taught to us in school is to stretch soft tissue and manually work on it through kneading and stripping as different forms of compression. For the most part, this works great for muscles, but if an irritated nerve is the primary source of the pain for an individual, this approach could lead to more pain, inflammation, and worsening symptoms.

Since nerves have limited stretch ability, if it is entrapped or compressed by soft tissue along where it runs, it needs to be released for the pain to alleviate. Think of it as a rope being trapped by a door as it runs from one end to the other in a house. For the rope to move freely, that door has to be reopened. This can also happen to nerves in the body. Nerve flossing is a technique that can help with this process.

Nerve flossing or nerve mobility creates sliding and gliding of the nerve to help free it from the soft tissue surrounding that may be restricting it. This non-invasive technique is done through gentle mobilizations targeting the specific nerve causing the pain that the individual is feeling which is determined through assessment by a knowledgeable practitioner. The nerve gets released over time with the repetitions that are performed and the pain can be reduced significantly.

Every nerve gets targeted through different movements, so consult a medical practitioner if you feel like nerve flossing might benefit you. Book today!