People usually think of the stomach as the thing around our belly button that hurts sometimes after some meals, but in the medical field we are talking about the stomach that sits in your left rib cage between the esophagus (the tube going down from the mouth) and the small intestine (that is the one around your belly button, this time!)
An unhappy stomach can cause many symptoms that may seem unrelated: shoulder pain, neck pain, jaw pain, rib and back pain, dental problems, palpitations/chest pains, dry cough in the mornings… the list goes on. If your stomach is the root cause of these symptoms, then without treatment, these symptoms will persist, no matter how you attempt to treat them.
Sophia came in for an Osteopathic treatment to deal with pain she had been experiencing at the back of her rib cage for ten years. She had been to chiropractors who manipulated her ribs and spine, massage therapists who worked on the muscles of her back, physiotherapists who gave her stretches; but nothing gave her lasting relief from the rib pain.
As the mother of two children and someone working full-time, Sophia was a busy bee and a little stressed as a result. It turns out that stress tends to aggravate the stomach. So with Sophia, we treated her whole body to rebalance it, but her stomach and the left hand side of her diaphragm were not working as well as they should have been. We then spent some time releasing the fascial connections in and around her stomach.
Three weeks later, she couldn’t believe it: she was pain-free–and the pain did not return. She was so surprised that she asked me how it was possible to get rid of a chronic pain so quickly. “Well,” I said, “we treated the cause of your rib pain which, for you, was a referral pain from your stomach and its connections in the rib cage, which was pulling on your rib from the inside.”
Some simple advice about stomach health now helps Sophia to manage her “busy”, stressed stomach!
– Chloe Sardin, Osteopathic Therapist