Visceral Manipulation is an osteopathic technique developed over the last 20 years by renowned osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral.  It is the manipulation of the abdominal organs using mobility and motility to increase the vitality of each organ and release restrictions so the organs are better able to do their jobs.    Internal adhesions can be reflected outward as muscular or joint pain and can even restrict how we are able to move through space, i.e. can we stand upright?  Or are we bent forward and rotated in response to an old appendectomy scar?
 
Part of Visceral Manipulation is the belief that organs are the repositories for strong emotions and that when the organ is in dysfunction it can contribute to emotional dysfunction and vise versa.  When organs are treated and become less restricted so does the emotional component.

Love Your Liver

The liver has hundreds of tasks to perform every day and it usually does them quietly and efficiently.  Along with producing and secreting bile the liver filters hundreds of liters of blood each day.  Cleaning, detoxifying, storing some nutrients, releasing others, creating and regulating hormones...its busy, busy, busy.  When we don’t treat it right, it and we become tired, tired, tired.  It is the energy powerhouse, supplying us with deep stores of energy.

How do you know when your liver needs some love?  Some of you may remember how it feels when you’ve over indulged the night before and you feel slow, headachy, tired and unclear in your thinking.  These and other symptoms are common when your liver is constantly overworked or chronically stressed.  Liver often refers pain to the right side of our body, so ribs 5, 6, 7, and 8 have less movement, right shoulder pain, right elbow pain (hmm, stuck liver = tennis elbow), right sided headache or sinus pain...and that’s just the top half!

Because our liver touches almost every other organ in our abdominal cavity it can affect or is affected by those organs.  Sometimes a stuck liver can lead to right-sided sciatic pain as it can restrict the right colon and therefore the sciatic nerve as it exits the pelvis.

In women some symptoms of PMS can be contributed to the liver as it is involved in the metabolism of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.   The more sluggish and overworked the liver is the more symptoms we may have.  Irritability, hot flashes, night sweats, emotional upheaval.

Your liver’s happiness is reflected in the condition of your skin; think back to when you went through puberty and how your skin looked.  Lots of hormones were zinging around your body and your liver was involved.  Then as now, it would have been happier if your diet were liver friendly.

So give your liver some love, breath deeply, sweat a little and eat and drink in moderation...So simple.

by Gaelen Gibson