Can deep massage and posture manipulation replace your pain with physical and emotional balance? Niamh Hooper investigates
If you haven't yet heard of rolfing, you will.
Rolfing is a form of deep connective tissue manipulation and movement education.
Developed by Dr Ida Rolf, a former biochemist with the Rockerfeller Institute in New York, in the 1950s, the technique is aimed at improving health by creating a more balanced upright body.
She believed that people were often "off balance" and cannot attain good posture because their bodies are fixed in position for a variety of reasons.
For example, following a fall, a person might have strained their ankle. Unable to put weight on that foot for a while, the other foot compensates. Gradually, they get into the habit of not putting equal weight on both legs and the pelvis and back muscles get strained from the compensation.
Dr Rolf claimed that 80 per cent of physical pain is the result of strain imbalance. She developed a system of deep connective tissue manipulation to structurally rebalance all body segments in the gravity field. Once the body is not at war with gravity, she believed, muscle strain would abate, thereby alleviating aches and pains.
Ireland's first rolfer was Seamus Keane, who has been practicing for the past 20 years. When Seamus first experienced rolfing in San Francisco in 1973, he says he became aware of the powerful effect it had on opening his whole being - physically and emotionally.
He trained in the Rolf Institute in Munich and has since completed numerous advanced courses in Berkeley to develop his ability further as a rolfer and movement teacher. Practising between Galway and Dublin, he is passionate about encouraging people to develop a healthy relationship with their bodies.
Unlike many other physical treatments, rolfing actively involves the client's participation. What happens on the table is only half of it.
A rolfer will look at how you are using your body, identify the causes of imbalance likely to be leading to the pain and manually lengthen and reposition the tissue like never before.
The rest - the movement education part - is up to you. With a rolfer's guidance you are taught, by feeling and seeing, new ways to stand and move.
"Fundamental to rolfing is the way in which a person's foot meets the ground. With the average person walking 300 kilometres a year, if they are not walking properly there's a lot of scope for damage," Seamus says. The 26 bones in the foot were designed to be used, he adds, and if they are not the repercussions will be felt throughout the body.
Once we are out of alignment there's no point in telling someone to stand straight, he says, because it's impossible since the connective tissue has tightened and shortened. But as this connective tissue is "plastic" and therefore changeable, he says it can be anatomically ordered and re-aligned.
Orthopaedic surgeon in the Mater Hospital Dr Michael Stephens says he has no experience of this form of management.
"Personally I use physiotherapists to get people moving properly . . . I am not aware of any scientific back-up to support rolfing, so it probably would fall more into the realm of techniques such as reflexology."
Dublin-based chartered physiotherapist Fionnuala Tansey says: "Good biomechanics and alignment are important to prevent chronic back and neck pain, especially in athletes, and any approach that encourages that is good."
As with any treatment, she stresses the importance of going to a practitioner with officially recognised qualifications who is a member of a recognised professional body.