The body is a complex system composed by different parts. Although current medicine tends to see every part individually, the reality is that every part has mutual relationship with the others, also when anatomically distant: what happens to the head has repercussion on the feet and vice versa. If you have pain or injuries in one spot of your body, probably the cause is in a complete different place than you think.
The standard analysis sees individual muscles in isolation, divided from their connections above and below. The reality is that whatever else they may be doing individually, muscles also influence functionally integrated body-wide continuities within the fascial webbing, forming traceable meridians of myofascia. Stability, strain, tension, fixation, resilience and postural compensations are all distributed via these lines that run from head to feet.
Thomas Myers in his fascinating work of Anatomy Trains [1] describes myofascial meridians that run throughout our body, linking the individual muscles into functional complexes (Figure 1). The myofascia is a thin layer which covers and wraps around the muscle, connecting a variety of structures in the body together.
In order to guarantee body balance, the myofascia in a human body has intrinsic tone and is never completely lax (stress/strain can never reach zero): the integrity lies in the balance of tension, named tensegrity. Forces are distributed throughout the system rather than locally concentrated and the musculoskeletal system therefore functions as a single unit. This is where the compensatory mechanisms of our body lie, how the scoliosis arises from occlusion problems and how a forward head posture affects the pelvis.
In Figure 2 we can observe two of the twelve meridians described by Thomas Myers, the Superficial Front Line and the Deep Front Line. See how the top of the foot is connected to the skull or how the legs are connected to the jaw. It is really interesting to see for example how the ebb and flow of breathing (dictated by the diaphragm) is connected to the rhythm of walking (organized by the psoas). The body really is an unique system!
Another concept that provides a framework to understand the body in a holistic way is the concept of trigger points. These are described as hyperirritable spots in the fascia surrounding skeletal muscle, associated with palpable nodules in taut bands of muscle fibers [2].
The trigger point model states that unexplained pain frequently radiates from these points of local tenderness to broader areas, sometimes distant from the trigger point itself. Practitioners claim to have identified reliable referred pain patterns which associate pain in one location with trigger points elsewhere. An example is shown in Figure 3, where we can see how trigger points in cervical muscles propagate pain in distal points in the head.
References
TMD - Occlusion 