Last month I went on a dissection workshop hosted by Kings College London Guys Hospital campus where a group of us spend 3 hours in the dissection lab in an effort to understand the human body a bit further. It was run by the Federation of Holistic Therapist (FHT) and a well know physiotherapist and author of many books, Jane Johnson. I cannot tell you how invaluable the experience was as a massage therapist or as a personal trainer working with individual’s day to day who have dysfunctions, injuries or asking for general advice on health and wellbeing with regards to their bodies.
A lot of people have been saying it’s a bit weird or creepy but if you look past the dead people and see them as bodies, machines, there is a great deal to learn from actually seeing the anatomy of the human in situ, in real life, and not from a diagram or drawing.
The most valuable lesson learnt from being guided around prepared prosections (limbs and torsos that have been preserved and dissected to differing degrees to show different anatomical structures) was that everyone is very slightly different in their structure, shape, adaptations and even different in the same duplicate structures within the body. For example we were looking at peoples scapulars, the shoulder blade, and the acromion. This is the point of the shoulder blade that projects over the top of the ball and socket joint which the collar bone attaches. This is a structure which one of the rotator cuff muscles the, supraspinatus runs under. It was demonstrated that the acromion can be different between individuals and also from left and right within the same individual. This could explain why some people or a shoulder joint maybe more susceptible to shoulder impingement.
Another great observation was the Iliotibial tract or the ITB band. This is a fibrous structure running down the outside of the upper leg from the hip down to the outside of the knee. Its function is to support the lateral aspect of the knee with the Tensor Fasciae Latae (TFL) and the gluteus maximus feeding into it. Observing these structures on different individuals showed that the TFL was not the same and could be and thick fibrous or so thin and spread that it was undeferential to the other fascia of the upper leg.
These and other observations allowed me a trainer and therapist to really understand how the bodies structure is varied between individuals and how very interconnected it is with the fascia being a key component in movement and function. It has just solidified how if you have a dysfunction or restriction in one area it will effect the body as a whole as it adapts to deal with it.
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