Amatsu Therapy
What is Amatsu?
Essentially, Amatsu is a “hands on” modern bio-dynamic musculo-skeletal therapy. It has its roots in traditional Japanese medicine, which are based on and are designed to enhance our own “natural body movement”. Amatsu has been described as the Art of the Opening Flower, due its unique approach of mimicking nature. Amatsu means “mysterious hands”
Why do we use it?²
How Amatsu is unique, is the body movement of the practitioner and their specific touch during a treatment, which allows us to cross the interface of tissue and access beneath the client’s nervous system to initiate change.
We are searching the body for “stress forces” which can affect a body’s health and balance. These can appear as a result of physical force, injury or surgery, virus, infection or even emotional circumstances. Stress forces are stored energy, and in the body this can equal tightness and misshaping of tissue, causing our body to “adapt” its balance. Stress forces often appear in patterns, we have more than one, and they can span the length of the body.
In a treatment with a combination of our hand and body movement, we can detect the changes in tissue quality as a result of a stress factor. We then use a specific touch of gentle pressure to release the stored energy and to re-balance the tensegrity ¹ matrix of the tissue, which in turn may have been causing adaption in the shape of the body’s structure. For example, commonly, one leg appears longer than the other when the pelvis becomes misaligned and often quite simply can be as a result of tissues having taken on stress adapted patterns.
Equally, we have respect for natural principles within the body; we never take or force the body anywhere it doesn’t want to go! Therefore Amatsu is basically a GENTLE therapy. At times pressure can be firm, but overall the client feels very very relaxed during and after treatment and afterwards an immediate increased feeling of well being is normally observed.
How?
In a treatment we work throughout the body using a variety of techniques over four “levels” of hierarchy (muscles, bones and joints, tissue and viscera (organs) and cranial techniques), but ostensibly to achieve two key factors by the end of the session;
• Firstly, that the body (particularly the pelvic area) is re-balanced and re-integrated and can begin self healing - including reciprocal (both sides) muscle tension, soft tissue release and mobilisation, visceral release, ligament tension coupling and cranial sacral re-balancing. In order to recover and then prevent.
• Secondly and very importantly, that the body’s natural ability for proprio-reception is literally “switched back on” (almost certainly damaged during injury) which therefore enables us to re-access our co-ordination, speed of reaction, intuition and judgement, spatial awareness, anticipatory abilities and basic vertical competency in space and time – our ability to stand upright, given external energetic forces.
Both of these key factors and particularly the proprio-reception element are of course especially important within sport and physical fitness and also for concentration learning in adults and children.
Who comes for treatment?
As Amatsu is a musculo-skeletal realignment therapy many clients come to me initially with injury; some from sport; including both professional and amateur, football, rugby, tennis, golf and yoga. Other’s simply by word of mouth. Anyone can have Amatsu!
I then find that as results are so dramatic, most clients continue to come in and see me for regular MOTs, never wanting to again and to enhance feelings of general well being.
What do I treat?
There are very few conditions that haven’t been successfully treated with Amatsu, as we are scanning the body as a whole; we focus on treating the body as a whole which affects more than one body system in each treatment so “symptoms” experience relief. Although we can say that we can treat certain conditions, I generally find that it is a combination of pulls and twists in tissue creating more than one symptom which affects most people, so treatment is highly tailored.
However, Amatsu has specifically been known to help;
Back and pelvic alignment problems* frozen shoulders, neck pain, tennis and golfers elbow * groin and hamstring strains * ankle and knee strains * headaches and especially migraines * sinusitis * asthma and breathing problems * indigestion problems * IBS * TMJ and jaw problems *performance enhancement * post operative and serious injury recovery* and is suitable and very effective through pregnancy and for new born babies.
My areas of specific interest include:
TMJ, jaw and cranial misalignments in adults and especially children
Headaches and Migraines
Pregnancy and New Born infant care
Regularity of Treatment?
Clients’ don’t need to come weekly; the average for an existing client is 3-4 weeks. New clients will be seen for a follow up within a couple of weeks of initial treatment and a personal treatment programme will be discussed with them tailored to their initial complaint.
I find that most clients continue to come for “MOTs”, even after their symptoms are relieved, as they prefer never to feel the way they did again!
How long will I have symptoms after a treatment? How do they disappear?
Generally, it takes the body up to 4 days to settle down fully after a treatment and during that time, for many people, most symptoms appear to disappear! However, not immediately in all cases dependent on severity and time.
Symptoms are a very important assessment tool, but are not the principle by which we treat.
When you come for a treatment you present to your practitioner your symptoms or in most cases a collection of symptoms, which helps build a picture of how you and your body feel.
Because we treat the body as a whole, your practitioner then interprets what your body needs for optimum healing, based on your presentation, their clinical assessment, their touch and intuition and experience.
In the first part of a treatment I hold a client’s feet, in that time I’m scanning the body and beginning my “dialogue” with your body. Establishing whether your collection of symptoms matches its requirements and assessing the priority in which your treatment should progress.
Often trauma is layered deeply through the body and although some symptoms may feel acute to you, that particular symptom can be manifested from a trauma that is from a deeper layer. Indeed potential acuteness could potentially be correlated against depth in some cases.
The body can only successfully clear one or maybe a couple of layers at a time. Although, often after an initial treatment, deep layers of pain of trauma are able to correct themselves as a result of a higher layer being released and therefore no longer being “locked in”. On other occasions, subsequent treatments will allow subsequent layers to be released.
Only your body can determine its own healing time frame, it is not an exact science and everyone is completely different. However, as a rule of thumb acute conditions can experience relief with 3-4 sessions or less and chronic conditions typically 8-10 sessions dependent on severity and time lapsed since onset.
Often by your second session your practitioner will be able to give you an indication of how many sessions you will need, based on how well your body has responded to the changes made, whether those corrections have held and whether your body has been able to access deeper layers of trauma than simply those areas treated in your first session – in other words how do you feel? How are your original symptoms?
When is Treatment Inappropriate?
If at all in doubt, please ask!
Post operative (general anaesthetic) – I don’t treat for 4-6 weeks, dependent on the nature of the surgery versus the complaint requiring treatment.
With local anaesthetic – once again, it depends on the procedure site, versus the location of the complaint, but it’s normally ok to have treatment 1-2 weeks post procedure.
I don’t work locally in and around the pelvis in first trimester of pregnancy, however that doesn’t preclude treatment in other area, or cranial for other conditions, so please check with me.
Other medical conditions may be dependant on personal medical history or symptoms presenting on the day. I reserve the right to refuse to treat or send for medical attention any client I believe is displaying symptoms of medical alert.
¹ Tensegrity or tensional integrity is a type of structure with an integrity based on a balance between tension and compression components. Wikipedia 2010.
² Credit – Dennis Bartram and Dr. Stephen Levin
