Interesting Facts

With the advent of industrialisation, and right through to the 20th century, there were schools of orthopathy in the English-speaking world. These orthopathic schools taught ideas for leading a healthy life. The aim was for working people to benefit from many forms of exercise and from healthy eating.

Florence Nightingale and Henry Ford were among the supporters of orthopathy.

  • From 1904 onwards, the American orthopaedist Joel Goldthwait published various works on the effect that posture, and bad posture, have on health, and on the resulting illnesses.
  • Ida Rolf, a biochemist from New York, developed the method of manipulating the fascia that is named after her (Rolfing), based on the works of Joel Goldthwait.
  • In the 1990s, the American osteopathic doctor and chiropractor Steven Typaldos was dissatisfied with the manual medical methods he had been taught. He developed his own method of diagnosis and therapy of the fascia, which he also called Orthopathic Medicine.

Today

  • In orthopathy, the fascia is seen as an organ. The fascia is organised microscopically and macroscopically by continuous tension forces and discontinuous compression forces according to the principle of tensegrity.
  • Orthopathy brings together all the national and international research findings on the subject of the fascia and includes them in practical treatment.

Tensegrity

One important basic principle in the bioechanics of biological systems is the tensegrity principle. The word “tensegrity” is a portmanteau made of “tension” and “integrity”. It derives from the construction method in which struts and tension elements are joined together in such a way that the struts do not touch each other but that the building is nonetheless stable. The invention of this form of construction is attributed to the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and the Russian artist and sculptor Kenneth Snelson. However, the Russian design engineer Karl Loganson also experimented with strut constructions at the start of the 20th century.

The body is also constructed according to the tensegrity principle. This applies at both the cellular level and the level of the whole body. At whole-body level, the bones form the discontinuous support elements, and the (myo)fascial system forms the continuous tension elements. The result is that the bones are floating in the (myo)fasciale system. Contrary to the widespread view that there is pressure on the joints, the opposite is actually the case. When functioning normally, the joints are in tension. If the tension elements do not function properly for any reason, the tensegrity principle breaks down, and pressure is created. At the level of individual cells, the tensegrity principle results in a plasticity that contributes to regulating each cell’s shape and metabolism. The conversion of mechanical information into metabolic processes is called mechanochemical transduction. The process involves integrins and others, as well as actin and myosin. Calcium channels can also be opened by stretching. Thus, the metabolic fields described by Blechschmidt and their mechanical force vectors also influence morphogenesis, both during embryonal development and during adaptation and regeneration processes.

The end result is a mechanical network that stretches from the macro level of the musculoskeletal system to the micro level of the individual cell and right into the cell nucleus, transmitting mechanical information and controlling the corresponding metabolic processes. Overall, the tensegrity principle also offers protection by distributing mechanical forces in individual cells and in the whole body in such a way that the local effects of forces can be kept to a minimum.

Diagnostics

Orthopathic diagnostics views you as a patient with your own individual symptoms, but also includes the results of laboratory tests and visual scans.

  • In orthopathy, the fascia is seen as an organ. The fascia is organised microscopically and macroscopically by continuous tension forces and discontinuous compression forces according to the principle of tensegrity.
  • Orthopathy brings together all the national and international research findings on the subject of the fascia and includes them in practical treatment.

Practical Treatment

An easy way to explain orthopathy is to say that it comprises the following therapeutic approaches:

  • The Fascial Distortion Model
  • The Gesret Method
  • Atlas Therapy
  • Fascial Fitness
  • Fascial Walk