Tennis Elbow, part 2 – The victim screams, not the culprit

Body pain is the signal of system disturbance. The cause may lie directly in the area of the pain, or it can be located much further. That’s why therapies focused only on treating the area of the pain are often ineffective. One of the mottos of holistic medicine is the saying ‘the victim screams, not the criminal’. That’s why we will focus on finding the ‘bad guy’ whom we will call the Hot Spot.

Each of the systems responsible for transporting or transmitting the energy in the human body has its own Hot Spots. They are places in which, due to their structure, decrease of capacity may occur. If the compression on nerve, vessel, or fascia will occur in a Hot Spot, then the pain can spread further.

Let us begin with circulatory and nervous systems. The first Hot Spot, in which blockages often occur, is the area of scalene muscles. Those muscles go from cervical transverse processes to the first and second rib.

Their task is to assist the inhale by pulling the ribcage upward. Muscles, like every other human tissue, adapt to the environment they are in. Sitting in one position for long periods of time (usually with the head tilted in the direction of the screen, book, or phone) leads to the muscles being stuck in one position. Additionally, majority of our population don’t know how to breathe with the use of diaphragm.

We overuse chest breathing, which introduces additional stress to the already overloaded scalene muscles and tightens it even more. Additionally, the gap between scalenus anterior muscles and scalenus medius muscles is even narrower. As a result of the muscle blockage, there occurs narrowing of the subclavian artery and brachial plexus. As a consequence, there is less blood in the brachial artery and the compressed plexus will give symptoms from all the nerves in the hand. From the holistic medicine perspective, the pain is caused by the amount of system disorders, i.e. the disorders of: circulatory system, nervous system, fascia system, digestive system, lymphatic system. From this perspective we will analyse every case.