User:Niel Asher Technique/sandbox

The Niel-Asher Technique™ is a 'natural' method of treatment that utilizes the body's own healing mechanisms. No drugs, no surgery.

The NAT treatment is “hands-on”. It involves using a sequenced series of pressure points and stretching maneuvers. Some of it can be painful while other parts are soothing. This is for a reason - the tissues of the body have many types of receptors embedded within them. Some respond to deep touch, others to superficial touch, some to pain, others to hot or cold. All of our human experience of our environment is mediated through our tissues’ sensory receptors. Our tissues sense the world around us and translate these sensations into messages that our brain decodes.

We believe that physical therapy should contain as many types of sensation as possible. This is so that the brain can get as much feedback about a damaged area as possible. In fact, we see treatment like a landscape. It should have mountains as well as valleys, peaks as well as troughs. Pain itself is an important feedback for the brain. All too often we avoid painful sensations. This is an in-built mechanism. However, gently reproducing the pain in a therapeutic situation can be extremely beneficial when combined with gentler and less painful stimuli.

Physical therapy often involves a sequence of manoeuvres. We think that it is not so much the manoeuvres that matter as the feedback profile that these manoeuvres create in the brain. Each manoeuvre stimulates a different profile (set of nerve impulses) depending which tissues and nerve endings are stimulated.

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Another analogy that may help to understand the way NAT works is that of a dialogue. The body and brain are in a constant state of dialogue. If you do not exercise or move around very much, the brain gets used to this diminished set of feedback mechanisms and adapts accordingly. If you are a walker or play sport, the feedback from the muscles to the brain during these activities creates a pattern, a type of vocabulary for the nervous system. The less activity you do the less rich the vocabulary.

In the case of a frozen shoulder (as in many other physical complaints) the dialogue has become greatly limited. The Niel-Asher technique, if performed in the correct order, stimulates and re-awakens this vocabulary thus allowing the body and nervous system to communicate again.

Similarly, in general, the more physical activity we do the greater the vocabulary to the brain and the greater the sense of self-awareness. For example, just doing some gentle yoga will create a tremendous amount of mind-body vocabulary.

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NAT differs from other physical therapy techniques not so much by what is done, but by the order in which it is performed - in this way it is like a cooking recipe. It is the order in which NAT is performed that stimulates the damaged tissues to fire off different signals to the brain.

http://www.golftoday.co.uk/news/yeartodate/2013/shoulders.html

These signals are in specific sequences. They re-establish the relationships between the sensory feedback and the motor map within the brain.

NAT uses the various types of sensory feedback from the injured shoulder muscles to re-program the frozen shoulder and to “defrost” it quickly and efficiently.

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Evidence-Based Technique

The Niel-Asher Technique®™ is evidence-based. In a Randomized Placebo Controlled Trial, conducted in association with the Rheumatology Research Unit at Addenbrookes hospital (Cambridge, UK), the technique was compared to a standard physiotherapy protocol (with exercise) and placebo for the treatment of frozen shoulder syndrome (British Journal of Rheumatology. 42 (Suppl 1). Article 418 BHPR p.146. 2003).