From Tom Myers: The Old Gray Lady has taken on the interstium, and rolled it in with Langevin’s work with acupuncture.
Read the NYT ‘Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways’ article here.
In so many ways, the fascial idea is a ’systems’ idea, not an object description. There are very specific laboratory reasons why the interstitium was not discovered until a few years ago – the histological method was hiding the canals. But there are also psychological reasons we could not ’see’ the fascial system or the interstitium because we tend to think in parts not wholes.
The ‘objections’ to the fascial or the interstitial ideas are more often a failure of imagination than a lack of science. Science needs identifiable objects, whereas large systems thrive on the interaction of tiny agents. Like us. Like our society.
Fascia, acupuncture, and the interstitium are less about solid and identifiable structure, and more about relationships. That shift – from object to relationship – is an epistemological change from cause / effect to correlative systems thinking.
Such a shift happened between Newton – force and motion in objects – to Einstein – relativity in all things space and time.
Such a shift happened with pathology: Freud identified the ‘objects’ in the psyche – id, ego, superego – where Jung placed them (and us) in a relational constellation among the archetypes of the subconscious.
Such a shift is happening now with anatomy. The interstitium represents the medical view of what was between the cells. We’ve known about interstitial fluid for years; we just didn’t know about its ‘organ’-ized nature until we could 1) see in vivo, and 2) think in terms of whole systems instead of discrete ‘organs’.
We are going through a similar process in fascial research. The terms in which research proposals must be framed re: the terms of the Newtonian, objective world. The ’terms’ on which fascia actually works are neither linear nor are they predicted by the actions of the objects with the system. It is a synergy – an action of the whole unpredicted by the actions in any of the parts.
In other words, systems are not simply a sum of all their objective parts. Systems are also the rules that govern the relational behavior – and that’s what we are trying to find in our ‘holistic’ healing work, those dynamic principles of complex systems processing.
It is in these relationships that true healing occurs – in the sense of ‘resolution’, rather than simple ‘repair’.
