Functional Neuromyofascial Activity: Interprofessional Assessment to Inform Person-Centered Participative Care—An Osteopathic Perspective

Abstract

Introduction: Health professionals and bodyworkers may be pivotal in promoting prevention programs, providing tailored advice and guidance to patients’ adherence to self-care strategies, such as physical activity. Contemporary evidence encourages manual therapists to involve patients in decision-making and treatment procedures integrating passive and active approaches in treatment planning. This manuscript provides a definition and applications of neuromyofascial movement patterns, discusses the significance of functional assessment, and gives an example of clinical applications in the osteopathic field to highlight how this assessment can promote interdisciplinarity. Methods: The reporting framework used in the current manuscript followed guidelines for writing a commentary. Results: The manuscript highlights the crucial role that the neuromyofascial system plays in human movement and overall well-being and the importance of a functional neuromyofascial activity assessment in the context of person-centered participative care. Conclusions: Understanding individual neuromyofascial patterns could help healthcare practitioners, movement specialists, and bodyworkers in tailoring treatment plans, meeting patients’ unique needs, and promoting a more effective personalized approach to care. The current perspective could spark debates within the professional community and provide a research roadmap for developing an evidence-informed interprofessional framework.

Flexibility and Strength Effects of Adapted Nordic Walking and Myofascial Exercises Practice in Breast Cancer Survivors and Analysis of Differences

“…Accumulating evidence from dissection studies confirms the role played by the myofascial meridians identified by Myers [26], which connect distant parts of the body via muscles and fascial tissues [29,30]. This anatomical and functional knowledge suggests that physical exercise should be framed as a whole-body rather than a local approach to have a faster, more balanced, and effective result [31].…”

Epistemological Flexibility in Person-Centered Care: The Cynefin Framework for (Re)Integrating Indigenous Body Representations in Manual Therapy

“…This approach aims to increase awareness of how the body functions, behaves and interacts with others. With this knowledge inherited from early practitioners and renewed today, osteopathic practitioners have recently proposed additional treatment strategies administered not with patients lying on the table receiving passive manual therapy, but while performing functional movements [ 71 ]. The rationale is that hands-on experiential bodywork influences self-tracking of the lived body through body awareness.…”

“…The patient, being aware of the different reasoning that can be applied, makes sense of precedent treatments and shares with the osteopathic practitioner the decisions regarding the proposed osteopathic treatment planning. The progressive sequence of the overall physiotherapeutic and psychotherapeutic treatment plan is centered on the clinical context, based on available guidelines [ 95 ], and is indicated by the circled numbers 1 and 2; the subsequent personalized osteopathic treatment plan defined by shared decision-making [ 41 , 51 ] to promote participative-active osteopathic treatment [ 71 , 87 ] with a combination of touch-based and mindfulness-oriented strategies [ 97 , 98 , 99 ] and synchronized music listening [ 100 ], as well as self-management counseling [ 101 ] and is marked by the numbers 3 and 4. Abbreviations: symptom-oriented physical examination (SPE), functional physical examination (FPE), familial symptoms (FS), osteopathic palpatory findings (OPF), structure-function test (SFCT), manual assessment tests of central sensitization (CS), two-point discrimination test (TPD), and Waddell’s sign (WS).…”