Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Palpation

Palpation is the ability to feel whats under your fingertips.  What connective tissue are you feeling?  The ability to discern a structure from another is one of the greatest skills a manual therapist can possess.  I can remember holding a neck for the first time and trying to feel the C2 landmass and wondering is that it?  We were told that it would get easier.  It did and does.  Something to practice and get better at.  One of the biggest problems with palpation and that is stressed in Functional Range Release is that what you expect to find, is the biggest hindrance in getting better at palpation.  Your preconceived notion of where anatomy should be, what anatomy should feel like,  is creating a mental block of what is actually being felt under your fingertips.

"A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."
Albert Einstein

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