Welcome back to the Healing Pain Podcast with Sue Hitzmann.
I know all of you have been listening to the podcast or watching the podcast on my blog at DrJoeTatta.com. In a matter of just two months, we have doubled the amount of downloads that we’re getting on iTunes. It makes me super happy because we are delivering the message of how we can heal chronic pain naturally in of course the United States and of course around the world. I do that through my efforts and the efforts of the great speakers I have. If you have a chance, hop into iTunes, give them a five-star review, say some nice things about me, some nice things of course about the experts I have in my podcast. They would love that. If you want to catch me live, you can find me at the PT NEXT Conference in Boston, Massachusetts between June 21st and June 24th, given by the American Physical Therapy Association. I’ll be talking about nutrition and its implications on musculoskeletal pain.
A big shout out to Debbie, who is a member of the Heal Your Pain, Heal Your Life Program. When Debbie joined the program, she had three epidural steroid injections in her neck as well as had two cervical spine surgeries, one fusion and one laminectomy. Debbie was placed on opioids, which made her sick and nauseous. She was given an SSRI or an antidepressant, which is called amitriptyline for the neuropathic pain that she developed. From that, she had problems with dry mouth, dizziness, and lightheadedness. When she went to her physician, the only thing they told her was to, “Suck on some ice chips or hard candy for the dry mouth. If you’re dizzy, just don’t move too fast and don’t get up fast out of a chair.” It’s wonderful that we have medicine if we need it, but we know that there are better ways to heal pain than this. I want to congratulate Debbie for joining the program. She is now absolutely 100% pain-free. She’s weaning off the medications. She’s weaning off the amitriptyline with the help of her practitioner. Congratulations, Debbie.
Many of you, as you’re listening to this podcast, you’re saying, “I think I’m getting ready to change my life. I want to start to move a little bit. But I still have this pain or this tension and this tightness in my muscles. What can I do?” Or maybe you’re looking for a massage therapist but you couldn’t find the right one and you’re saying, “How can I maybe massage myself at home or work on my tissue tightness and my pain at home in a way that’s easy, safe, and affordable?” I have for you, the expert today, who is going to deliver the answer to you. Her name is Sue Hitzmann. She’s developed a great method called the MELT Method.
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The Power Of Connective Tissue With Sue Hitzmann
Sue, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much.
You have a wonderful method called the MELT Method. You have a book that was a New York Times bestselling book, which describes the method and what it’s all about and how people can use that. I’m interested to hear your story first and how you came about the method, how you developed it, and what was really the brainchild behind it?
I have a long background in both fitness and neuromuscular therapy and body work. In working on clients, I fell into the same problem that a lot of therapists do that you’re working on the same people more than you think you should. They get hooked into always coming back to see you. One of my clients, I was like, “You don’t really need to come back here, you can do some things on your own.” She said, “If you could just invent a way for me to do it to myself what you do with your magic hands, I’d stay out of your office altogether.” I thought that’s interesting because I was doing a lot of light touch therapeutic intervention and very specific. I thought, “I wonder if I could do that for my clients.” In the late ‘90s, I started tinkering around with balls and rocks and rollers and PVC piping. I created this soft tool that was PVC piping wrapped in bubble wrap wrapped in a yoga blanket wrapped in a yoga mat and then duct taped it together so that it had this soft compression that I was looking for. I, one day, released my own neck. I knew I did it. I started sharing it with my clients like chronic migraine and TMJ. What was really profound was that they were not only able to do it to themselves, they came back better than they left, which was rare. Usually, they’d come back and they’d be back on the skew, and then you would tinker them up and they come back a little. They came back better and I thought that really did work. I just kept working with that.
In 2001, when 9/11 happened, I worked with a lot of people with post-traumatic stress disorder. What I found was that it didn’t matter where on the spectrum people were with chronic pain, whether it was coming from emotional distress or psychological or physiological or chemical, it doesn’t matter. If you could regulate neurological balance and restore the fluid flow of the connective tissue, the supportive infrastructure of the body, it could bring a body back to an ideal state. After I had worked on just thousands of people, by 2004, I really knew I had something. I started sharing the techniques in group environments. I found that they didn’t really need to come to see me. They could do it 100% on their own.
It was just a process over a number of years of realizing that I couldn’t talk about fibroblasts or glycosaminoglycans because they’re just too technical. It took a long bit of years to just create a language that the general public could understand. I had to develop my own tools because I couldn’t just keep making makeshift rollers. There was the whole process with that. Over the course of the years, by 2010, we had helped thousands and thousands of people. I thought I’m going to write a book for the general public and put the book out there. In 2013, it came out, we got into the New York Times Best Sellers and today I’ve got 1,300 instructors worldwide. The book has been translated into eight languages. I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface on what we could explain to the general public to keep them pain-free.
I want to go back to something you said earlier in our conversation here. You mentioned light touch. So often, when people think about any kind of tissue work, whether it’s tissue work they’re doing on their own or tissue work they’re going to see a practitioner for, there are many types of practitioners that use tissue work in their practice, we have this thought that if something hurts, you have a muscle that’s in spasm. We have to attack that muscle. We have to kill it. We have to really beat it up and roll it out like it’s a piece of dough. We want to take it from a big ball like this and want to totally flatten it. Can you maybe talk to us about the importance of light touch and why going too deep may not be a good thing?
There are so many things about that. To me, I’ve been trained in heavy compression techniques and light touch techniques. When I learned craniosacral therapy and visceral manipulation, it was all about slowing down and not getting too aggressive. Especially when it comes to self-care, we really don’t have a lot of awareness of our bodies to begin with. That body awareness is sometimes we just put the cart before the horse. We have this thing where if my neck was hurting me, I just want to dig a ball into my neck. We tend to go after the victim areas of our body. I always say those areas of your body that are hurting you are the victims. They’re the areas crying out for your help. I don’t understand why it is that we want to walk right up to it and punch it in the face to make it stop crying out for the health.
If we would just look at it that the criminals and the perpetrators that are causing us issues might not be in the areas where we’re feeling the pain problems. I always say, not that heavy compression is bad. In fact heavy compression has a right time and place. But the thing that most people when I say, “Why are you doing it?” The reality of it is they don’t really know. If you go too deep too fast into the body, the connective tissue, which is this three-dimensional infrastructure under your skin, it’s designed to resist the uptake of pressure because it’s trying to do its job to support the nerve endings and all the structures under our skin.
Oftentimes, when we go really deep really fast, we think we’re getting deeper but in fact we’re just irritating and causing low-grade inflammation in the superficial layers because that tissue is becoming more tense to support the tissue underneath. MELT, I always say, it’s not magic. It’s not a miracle. It’s a methodology. It’s really a nice starting place because it gives people time to learn their bodies better, to explore their body without risking damage or going too deep too fast. What I find profound with clients who start MELTing and then they start applying heavier compression techniques, they tend to ease their bodies into it more. They are more intuitive. They take more time and they get more benefits out of the heavier compression techniques overall. In the end, it doesn’t hurt them as much after they’ve been MELTing a while to begin with, which is the idea of why would you cause pain to get out of pain is your first route of fixing yourself.
No pain, no gain necessarily.
Still very, very much in our industry. It seems like it always has the cycle where it seems to quiet down and then the “no pain, no gain” especially with athletes. In the world today, we’ve got a lot of body dysmorphia, a lot of unhappy bodies and people who are dissatisfied with what they look like. They have judgment on themselves, judgment to others in what they perceive. That’s part of our culture. Again, our culture is to always, “Don’t think too much. Don’t feel too much.” That’s probably why we have so many people who are sick, that we just don’t allow our feelings and our intuition to really be present and to be present in the here and now and not be worried about tomorrow or what people are thinking of us to begin with.
We know that, obviously, your emotions, especially negative emotions, can make pain worse as far as the intensity and can also make it last longer. When someone comes to see you or they see one of your certified MELT instructors, what can they expect on the first visit, the first session?
One of the things that I do is I take a serious intake. If you’re doing one-on-one with any of our practitioners, we have a fourteen-page intake form to really get not only us to be investigators and to ask questions. I would say that when you fill out a history form, it’s not so that we can go, “A-ha, here’s the problem.” It’s more to be able to ask questions about what’s there. Sometimes just in the question-asking, it allows different parts of our brain to open up to change and to acknowledgement and recognition. That’s part of the healing process. Sometimes it’s becoming aware of what’s really going on.
Then we do evaluation, and our instructors are trained to help people assess themselves. I always say, you can be a great practitioner and you look at somebody and you’re like, “You’re all kinds of messed up. Your shoulder is high and your hips are low.” I always say, maybe what we’re looking at is the body’s natural beauty of being able to compensate for problems that we’re not really seeing. We mask our imbalances. Oftentimes, what a practitioner is seeing is the compensatory state of preservation.
With MELT, we try to do our self-assessments. What I’ve found in my clients with working on them is that I kept finding these four common imbalances in every single body. It’s funny when people have pain, two or three of these four are always present. When I identify that, it was actually a client who said to me, “Can I feel it for myself what you’re feeling?” I thought, “Yeah. Lay on the floor. Let’s see if you can notice what I’m feeling.” Sure enough, she could. I started to dialogue that with client after client and intake after intake form. It was the same exact problems. It was figuring out the protocol to eliminate those common imbalances. By eliminating just those imbalances, could we start to open the door to change and to repairing the body’s pain response and quieting and quelling the pain response? The answer is yes. That’s really what we do in the first session is to get to know the person and get the person to know themselves better.
If a practitioner’s wondering what the MELT method is about, of course they can go to your website which is MeltMethod.com. You can find out all about Sue Hitzmann and the method there. If you can give an explanation, is there a framework to the method that is followed when somebody becomes certified? What’s entailed in the process?
Yes. Actually, behind me I have some of our product back there. I developed these soft balls and soft rollers to introduce both compression and intentional pull techniques to the body. We go through what we call the four Rs of MELT. It’s the basic protocol of MELT: Reconnect, Rebalance, Rehydrate, and Release. The Reconnect technique is our assessment technique. Again, learning where stuck stress or connective tissue dehydration and imbalances are living in your body. The Rebalancing technique is treating your hands and your feet, which are oftentimes areas that we don’t even consider to take care of. I always say, the two most used parts of our body, it would be good if we took a little bit more time to take care of these little things, because your world gets awfully small when you get older and you can’t use your hands and feet.
The Rebalancing technique, I developed this neurological sequence to help people quiet the stress reflex and boost the autonomic nervous system’s ability to create rest and repair, which oftentimes is out of balance for people in chronic pain. You’re just always just in a state of high stress. The Rehydrate techniques are gentle compression and pull techniques to try to stimulate and affect the fluid flow of the fascial system. Really trying to get fibroblasts to react and respond and start to create that excitation and that messaging that occurs on a cellular level. We also teach people how to decompress or release the spaces of their neck and their lower back and the joints of their hands and feet, which again daily living causes some excessive compression. That compression can cause muscle imbalances, it can cause poor posture and just overall joint ache and pain.
Thirty years ago, we didn’t really know much about fascia. The truth is we probably don’t know a whole lot now. We’re learning more and more every day. I know you’ve really done your homework and you’ve talked to other experts, whether they’re physicians or other practitioners or people with PhD’s who have studied fascia. What do we think is going on with the fascia when we apply something like the MELT Method?
Actually, we’ve known about fascia for centuries. There’s always this idea where all of a sudden we were like, “Fascia!” I actually think it was quite explored in the 1500’s. Vesalius and some of these other researchers and anatomists were looking at the tissue. When chiropractic and modern day medicine came online, it was like we just started chucking it in the bucket to get to the good stuff, to learn more about the nerves and the bones and how joints and facets work and things like that. We disregarded it for a number of years. Because of that, it just laid low in what it was. About 30 years ago, what really transformed was Micron microscopes were starting to be used for surgical procedures. People like Dr. Jason Cumberto and researchers that were actually looking under the skin to view fascia, they were now able to see it on a much more cellular level.
What was discovered in the late ‘70s and ‘80s and then even more recognized was how fibroblasts can change and become other types of cells. They become myofibroblasts. If you cut yourself, they’re going to turn into myofibroblasts. If you break a bone, they turn into osteoblasts. The way that those five stages of wound repair occur, we’re actually recognizing that fascia is in fact a very reactive and responsive tissue. The mechanoreceptors, the sensory nerves that live in fascia are very reactive to the environment of the cellular system, of the extracellular matrix.
When we’ve done our low back pain study, one of the compelling things that we’re understanding is this whole idea of myofascial release. We always talk about fascia releasing. It doesn’t really release, it rehydrates. You improve the gliding ability or the sliding surfaces of fascia so that the transmission of force can be dispersed laterally instead of that traditional way of thinking how tendons from origin to insertion, everything’s very linear. It turns out that fascia is dispersing its messaging laterally to regions surrounding the areas and far away from the areas that are moving to create continuity and stability and balance. We’re really looking at fascia as a much more global system. For a long time, we were just looking at this passive packing material. Everybody’s a myofascial expert today. Everybody’s talking about myofascia. Myofascia is really just talking about how fascia relates to muscle. Fascia is doing so much for us. It’s a transportation highway for nutrient, for neurological signaling. It defends us from microorganisms. It’s really the infrastructure. It’s the only three-dimensional matrix in our body that can support and protect us and morph and adapt, which is a good and a bad thing because it adapts to our common imbalances and it thinks that we want to be in those sloppy postures that we sit in for five hours in a day. It’s also what gives us shock absorption and keeps our organs stable and allows turgor movement of the gut to function efficiently.
Today, we’re really looking at it in a much more global level. What science is starting to recognize is daily living causes cellular dehydration in the fascia. We’ve all experienced it like when you sit for long periods of time and you get up and you feel like you’ve aged about 50 years and your joints don’t really move so well, but then you move around and it goes away. We know that’s why movement is so vital is that it’s movement itself that creates the architecture and the sliding surfaces of fascia. If you allow that dehydration to accumulate, what the research is showing is that fascia, the fine balance between its stiffness and elasticity gets out of balance. If fascia becomes too stiff, it’s like a dried out sponge. A moist sponge can move and adapt and then return to its ideal shape. A stiff sponge, you move and it doesn’t want to react and respond and then when you let it go, it still looks bent. If you let that occur and the elastic properties of fascia breaks down, fascia has a tendency to become thick. When fascia is thickened, it can become fibrotic. It can cause instability in our joints. It’s one of the primary things that cause low back pain. When you MELT, what we found in our research is that four weeks of MELTing can actually reduce the thickness of the fascia, especially in those primary spaces or regions like our neck and our low back and restore function, neurological control, and reduce pain.
People don’t realize how diverse fascia is in your body. It supports your body and when it’s not healthy, how it can lead everything from musculoskeletal problems to neurologic issues to even hormonal balance. Those fibroblasts are so fascinating. They’re like stem cells where they could really just morph and change into other types of cells, which is incredible.
The stem cell research and fascia are becoming inherently linked and even the research in oncology and cancer and how fascia loves to live in stiff fascial regions, and that’s a problem for us. We know how important it is to keep the fluid state of fascia. There are a lot of concepts out there where they’re saying scratch your tissue and beat it up. The thing is, the superficial fascia is actually where fat loves to live. Within fat is hormonal cells and hormonal response. If you go at that tissue and you create low-grade inflammation repeatedly, you can actually throw cortisol into the mix and then your hormones get out of balance, it can cause neurotransmission, degradation, sensory nerve ending gets really mismanaged, and it can really throw your adrenal glands and the glandular system off in a radical way and actually cause negative effects that you’re not looking for when you do heavy compression techniques. It’s not that all heavy compression techniques are bad, it’s just really how we’re doing it, how often we’re doing it, why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it.
There are a lot of products out there that are the magic pill, but there’s no magic to good health. It’s a lifetime, it’s a methodology, it’s a process, it’s a philosophy. We just need to understand our bodies better and that changing our body; you don’t have to kill it, to change it. MELT is more of a way to open a door and say, “Come on in. Here’s something different. Why stay in this dirty apartment when you can come to this nice brand new studio apartment that’s got big windows?” You’re just offering something more bright and open to the body. When you treat the body that way, our cells are like mini-mes inside my body and they go, “This feels so good.” When you feel good, you move more and you’re happier. Your body is happy and so you have a happy body, happy mind. You enjoy life more, which is what everybody wants.
People send me pictures sometimes or they ask me my opinion about a certain treatment they’re doing for their pain. Oftentimes, I get people who have been to certain practitioners that use tools. They have spoons or knives and they’re used to rub against fascial structures and tissue and muscle, and people get bruising from it. Those who have fibromyalgia, who struggle with things like allodynia, where even just the sock on their foot can be painful for them, I really recommend doing something gentle like the MELT Method, where you’re really approaching your body in a way that’s compassionate and you’re really approaching your body in a way that’s gentle in the beginning. Over time, you may be able to handle from the pressure and that’s okay. You start out nice and gentle in the beginning. If someone’s listening to the podcast, they say, “I’m going to hop in online right now, I’m ordering the MELT Method kit, how many times would they start to implement this? How often would they implement this into their life, let’s say, on a weekly basis?
That was the thing with my clients. They were like, “How often do I have to do it and when?” I thought, “Could we get people to just do it anywhere?” The hand and foot treatments, the great thing about those and the way that’ve designed and developed the pieces that we’ve given to the general public in the book is each sequence is about ten minutes. If you’re one of those people that says, “I only have ten minutes a day to care for myself.” First of all, you’re going to start feeling so good you might actually do twenty minutes anyway. We always recommend ten minutes a day, three times a week at a minimum to create the fluid exchange in the cellular system. It takes at least that at a minimum. For my clients who have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or anything where their nervous or connective tissue or neurofascial system is out of balance, I always say less is more, get in and get out. You’re not going to solve the problem in a day.
You’re better off instilling the habit of self-care at the end of the day and doing just ten minutes, one sequence for seven days, every single day but just ten minutes at the end of the day. See how your body reacts to that. If it feels like it’s too much, back off and do it every other day. If it feels like it’s good, add to that where if you’re going to do ten minutes every day, maybe two times a week you’d do two sequences or you add three. I teach a one-hour class once a week and we get through almost every single thing in the book in an hour. People walk out of there just floating saying, “I feel like my body is resurrected from the dead when I leave.” I say, “That’s awesome.” Really, I always say three times a week at a minimum is your best starting place. You can work up to doing twenty minutes, three or four times a week. Really, MELT is so gentle. Because there are so many facets and nuances of it, you could do a little bit of MELT every single day and it’s very safe. I MELT my feet every day when I brush my teeth, so I don’t ever miss a day of melting.
I want to thank Sue Hitzmann for being on the Healing Pain Podcast. You can learn more about her and her great method called the MELT Method at MeltMethod.com. She recommended, just ten minutes a day, and whatever habit you’d like to develop with her, the MELT Method or this meditation or gentle exercise or working the recipes in your life can be the way to live a pain-free life. Believe me, pain-free is possible without drugs, medication, or surgery. This is Dr. Joe Tatta. I want to thank you for being on the Healing Pain Podcast this week. Make sure you share this episode with your friends and family on the blog. They can catch me each week at www.DrJoeTatta.com. I’ll see you next week.
About Sue Hitzmann
Sue is the creator of the MELT Method®, a simple self-treatment technique that helps people get out and stay out of chronic pain. A nationally recognized educator, manual therapist, exercise physiologist, and founding member of the Fascia Research Society, Sue is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The MELT Method, which has been translated into eight languages and helped over 200,000 people lead a healthy, pain-free life.
Website: https://www.meltmethod.com
The Healing Pain Podcast features expert interviews and serves as:
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A catalyst to broaden the conversation around pain emphasizing biopsychosocial treatments.
A platform to discuss pain treatment, research and advocacy.
If you would like to appear in an episode of The Healing Pain Podcast or know someone with an incredible story of overcoming pain contact Dr. Joe Tatta at [email protected]. Experts from the fields of medicine, physical therapy, chiropractic, nutrition, psychology, spirituality, personal development and more are welcome.
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