Fascia, your body's soft connective tissue, is a previously overlooked organ that is generating excitement as its potential unravels. New understanding of fascia is leading to increasingly accurate methods for assessing and treating chronic conditions, especially pain.

Recently I watched real-time ultrasound videos of sheets of fascia sliding and gliding against each other during normal movement in people with no back pain, and how this glide is inhibited or "stuck" in people with back pain. I have also seen video of living fascial motion taken with mini-cameras inserted during surgery. I could only marvel at the sheer beauty of strands of fascia - identical to a spider's web with dew drops of polysaccharides glistening as strands detached, moved and reattached in milliseconds,in response to movement. These fascial planes can get "stuck" and dense as a result of trauma, overuse, inflammation, age etc and this "densification", corresponds with pain and limitation of movement. It appears that much of the work that practitioners do achieves its results by restoring the slide/glide potential to these superficial layers of loose connective tissue.