About Me And My Office
I am a chiropractor. For years, I did manual manipulation, moving bones to give people relief. I helped a lot of people, but I did not have much luck treating tight muscles. Oh, I tried. I learned several muscle techniques, but to no avail. It was not until I discovered the power of laser therapy that I found a treatment that could actually loosen tight muscles. And since tight muscles are the source of most people's pain, that's what needs to be treated, even if you feel you need to be 'cracked' with chiropractic adjustments.
Laser therapy is unique. There is nothing else like it. No other treatment can do what lasers do. Lasers cause a photochemical reaction in your cells. Other therapies like massage, bony manipulation, physical therapy, drugs, etc., do not work this way because they do not utilize light. Many therapies are mechanical in nature, but as you will learn here, tight muscles are a biochemical problem that needs a chemical response, not by drugs, but by light.
A Different Approach with this Website
Instead of just talking about symptoms that you might have, I am going to teach you how I think about and treat painful conditions. In this way, I can show you that I approach things differently from what you might be used to, and you will learn more about how your body works and why it can hurt. I have a page for each of the more common symptoms people suffer from to offer a simpler viewing of my approach in treatment, but keep scrolling down before going to those pages.
After reading this, when you come in, you will know what I am going to do because you will see my methods here on this site. Scroll down a little, and I will explain things with pictures you have probably never seen before.
The Superficial Back Line
This is the first fascial line I show people on their first visit, demonstrating how muscles are connected over long paths called fascial lines. The muscles are separate structures, but fascia runs through them, connecting them all together. Most have not heard of fascia before, but it is the fourth type of connective tissue. The four being: Muscles, Tendons, Ligaments, and Fascia.
For example, if you are standing and lift your heels off the ground, you have to contract your calves. But if you need more power in your calves, your hamstrings can be recruited to help. If you are really struggling with those heel lifts, your back muscles might even get involved, giving your calves even more strength. And if you need even more, your neck muscles might help.
It can also be viewed in reverse: if your neck muscles need help, the back muscles all the way down could contract to add tension along the fascial line, helping your neck.
I know it’s a little weird, but these fascial connections are critical for us. We would be considerably weaker without fascia, and we would not be able to do all the things we can do physically without it.
Yes, it’s that important!!!
2. Fascia is key to understanding your pain
There are other fascial lines in the body, but this one image teaches people that muscles are connected.
People often say to me, “Everything is connected.” Yes, that is true, but these fascial lines show the muscles that are really, really connected. The connecting fascia allows muscles far away to help the muscles that need extra strength.
The fascial system is incredible when it is working properly, but frustrating to live with and treat when it is not.
You can have very tight muscles in parts of this fascial line that do not hurt one bit. But these tight muscles cause smaller muscles in the same fascial line to contract, which can then hurt. If you continue treating these painful muscles only, you never get better…Ever!!!
But treating the larger, non-painful muscles is where treatment should actually be rendered. This lets the painful ones finally let go and relax.
The Deep Front Line
This is the second fascial line I show people on their first visit, demonstrating another fascial line. It's called the Deep Front Line, but this line includes the hip flexors and all the muscles shown along the back of the leg. Don't let the name confuse you.
1. This is a very powerful line
This line is critical for understanding many problems in the body, especially the most common complaint: low back pain.
I want to get into discussing lasers and how they loosen up muscles, but for the moment, let’s put that aside because understanding pain and the role fascia plays in causing it is too important.
Using the arrows to the right, pay attention to the back of the legs, especially the lower legs. Notice how the calf muscles of the superficial back line are superficial to the muscles in your lower leg from the deep front line.
I often work the back of the lower legs because it is absolutely key to loosening the entire side of the body of the leg I treat with laser therapy. Yes, head-to-toe loosening, just by working the calves and getting deep enough with the laser therapy to get the deeper muscles of the deep front line.
But you say, “I don’t hurt in my calves!” This is true, but I have learned through much trial and error that this is a key area. And if you’ve been suffering for a long time with poor outcomes in your care, this could be one of the reasons. Plus, you will be sore here when I start evaluating these tissues. Then you will know I am onto something.
Compare images by Sliding the Icon Left and Right
Here is my basic premise for all the fascial lines. Find the largest non-painful muscles within the same line that a person is suffering elsewhere along that line, and see if the largest muscle is tight and tender. If it is, treat it and see if the person gets pain relief in the smaller muscles where they are hurting. If they get relief, continue treating the same larger muscle. It's not that the smaller, painful muscles don't need treatment, but that the smaller muscles are secondary to the larger ones.
The Arm Lines
All four arm lines shown below exist in each arm. All serve important functions for daily life. But not realizing these lines exist, not realizing these muscles work together through their fascial connections, leaves a practitioner shooting in the dark, trying to solve problems.
This line is critical if you have pain between your shoulder blades or in your neck. The Levator Scapula muscle will never relax if the triceps are constantly tight, which everybody seems to be, even though no one complains of triceps pain.
This line helps dramatically with front shoulder pain and arm pain. When people's shoulders are rolled forward, this is the line to treat.
This line is critical in treating tight traps, shoulder pain, and tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis).
This line is very important for treating tight chest muscles, golfer's elbow (medial epicondylitis), and some lower back pain cases involving the latissimus dorsi muscle, which is hard to see from this view alone.
There is so much more to cover about these lines, but to put everything on the home page would be excessive.
My Favorite Areas to Treat to Solve Pain
Calves and Triceps are my most favorite areas to treat to solve back and neck pain. “But I don’t hurt there”, you say. In fact, no one ever hurts there. I will explain why these are my favorite places to treat. But in a broader view of my favorite places to treat, I would have to say the extremities: legs and arms.
The conclusion I have come to is that our strongest muscles are in our arms and legs, yet these are connected to our torso (chest, abdomen, pelvis, and back), where the muscles are weaker and more prone to pain.
If our legs are tight, we can have low back pain, hip pain, sacroiliac pain, groin pain, and hip flexor pain, yet feel no pain in our legs. If our arms are tight, we can have neck pain, headaches, migraines, shoulder pain, upper back pain, and pain between our shoulder blades, yet not have an ounce of pain in our arms.
It is obvious to me, after treating several thousand people over the last 28 years, that this is the case. It is also why so many treatments fail to deliver long-lasting, positive results. This is a bold statement, but it’s not hard to prove to people when they feel the change in their low back pain after laser treatment of their calf on the same side for ten to twenty minutes. It’s not hard to prove when they feel the change in their neck pain after laser treatment of their triceps on the same side for ten to twenty minutes. It’s not hard to prove when they feel the change in their shoulder pain after laser treatment of their bicep for ten to twenty minutes.
Granted, I need to find the tight spots by poking around and finding the true problem. But tight triceps and tight calf muscles are so common that even if I didn’t check, I would still treat these areas, knowing I would likely help the person.
To summarize, I do need to check not only where the person hurts, but also the areas that don’t hurt that are connected to the spots that do. It’s rather fun to freak people out in this way. No one thinks their calves are the problem until I gently poke into their calf muscles, and they are stunned by how sore they are, especially in the deep muscles of the lower leg, in the center of the lower leg. These muscles are not your calf muscles. These muscles are deep to your calf muscles. But both the calf muscles and these deeper muscles are primary problems in the human body, even though most people say they only have tight calves, not painful ones.