The Treatment of Pain™
Onsen Muscle Therapy™
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Are you tired of treating symptoms and never finding the source of the problem?
Are you looking for answers? The Treatment of Pain™ has solved simple and extreme problems when no one else could!
Your Treatment of Pain™ Therapist has been trained to LOOK for those answers!
One of the highest values in your Onsen Muscle Therapists™ training is the detailed assessment skills. The have a full body protocol to find the source of your pain.
Onsen® is a very gentle method; it is very easy for both therapist and client.
While you are in the comfort of your elastic waist workout clothes, your Onsen® Therapist will:
• assess your boney landmarks which will give them a three dimensional look at the bones which may be out of alignment.
• discover the muscles or ligaments that are pulling your bones out of the proper play or balance in the joint.
• compare the assessments in different positions (standing, sitting, and lying) which will give more clues about the true source of the problem.
• Utilize gentle specialized forms of muscle energy techniques with isometric exercises (hold relax stretching on a massage table).
• give specific strategically positioned stretches and exercises that will retrain the muscle memory to hold your structure where it should be, based on the detailed assessments recorded.
• re-educate your joints and release the pressure on your nerves. If the electricity can reach your large muscle’s they will soften, release the pain and work normal.
• Use transverse friction massage: a two minute gently crossing of the fibres (with a little more vigorous TFM to follow) of the tissues, tendons or ligaments that are under tension or strain that are the cause of your pain.
• give a few specific stretches and exercises for you that will also be utilized for prevention of pain before you go on a long ride, airplane or activity.
After this, your structure will hold its muscle memory in the right places, your muscles will strengthen doing the jobs they were originally assigned to do by the brain, so your body can relax and return to its full function and comfort!
One important thing to remember about this cooperative therapy:
• Just like your brain practices a new math problem a few times, your muscles also need a chance to practice, to remember what to do.
• Treatment time depends on the therapist and the integration of Onsen Muscle Therapy™ into their practice.
o some therapists start you off with just assessments done in 30 minutes and your next appointment will be longer.
o some will assess and correct you within one hour
o others will take a longer history of your injuries, falls and medical detail, followed with assessment and correction
of the lower body before treating the upper body conditions all within one to two hours.
• Muscle memory may be affected by a dysfunction of or injury to the visceral or small/large intestines. This is often apparent when treatments don’t seem to last or have to be repeated every week.
o normal bowel function may be two to three bowel movements a day without constipation or loose runny bowels.
o often the answer to this is to take supplements to your diet that “feed the bowel” or “feed the organ that has been shut down.”
o Visceral therapy often helps those injured organs recover to help muscle memory. Your therapist may have these skills to
treat you in this area, but if not, you should consider asking them if you should consider adding this treatment to your program.
Your therapists may use Onsen Muscle Therapy™ to find the source of pain, and then use many of their other therapy tools to help solve your problems.
So stay committed to the key stretches or exercises that your therapist customizes just for you and that will put you in the driver’s seat of your own mobility for the rest of your life.
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Onsen® focuses on methods to assess and correct pain causing structural and functional deviations in order to provide long term relief. Rich Phaigh has developed this technique and offers a four part professionally produced DVD video training program that includes 150 assessments plus corrections and exercises.
Everyone who deals with the treatment of pain must acknowledge the importance of structural imbalances in the production of neuromusculoskeletal pain. The forces generated by these imbalances can be enormous, and every tissue in the body is affected when it is abnormally compressed or stretched due to these forces.
"I'm not interested in just making patients better, I'm interested in making them well!" - Rich Phaigh
One purpose of this website is to get the word out to therapists so they can learn this incredible technique. We also want to let people that have problems with pain and weakness know about the benefits they can achieve quickly and without pain from Onsen.
Here's what therapist Rich Mitchell had to say about his training.
"Absolute frustration is what I used to feel as I tried to give my patients permanent pain relief. Thanks to Rich Phaigh, now I have the tools to find and correct the cause of the problem rather than just work on the symptoms."
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In my early years as a massage therapist I concentrated my studies on different varieties of deep tissue work coupled with Polarity and Swedish techniques. They combined to give me clinical results which I felt, at the time, were extremely effective.From time to time, however, I would encounter tissues which would not release with the techniques I was using. Something was missing. Was the tissues I was attempting to release really tight? They felt tight and seemed to loosen with my efforts, but the changes were often temporary. Why? Because I didn't understand the role structural stress and deviation play in pain production.
When structural stress is the source of pain, the ONLY way to alleviate the pain is to correct the structure. Often pain shows up far away from its cause and that is why structural analysis is vital. If structure is not corrected and put in balance, every other method of treatment is simply palliative.
Nineteen years of constant study on the subject of soft tissue pain has given me a constantly growing understanding of the subject. There are common threads which run through all patients suffering pain which I would like to share with you. An understanding of these common threads will help us to set the wheels in motion for a complete and lasting change in the patients we treat.
No segment of body work has been as exciting or as effective in my practice as the restructuring of the human body. When I entered the field of bodywork nineteen years ago, if anyone had told me I would eventually learn the secrets of realigning twisted and deformed patients I would not have believed them. However, once I learned how simple the procedures were I put them to use at once.
Patients I had been unable to help with the many techniques I had learned over the years were called back in for another go round. The clinical results were amazing. I would like to share these techniques with you so thousands of other patients in pain might also be helped.
I have combined three treatment techniques and their underlying philosophies into treatment protocol I call ONSEN®. Onsen is a Japanese word meaning "at rest" or "at peace." It is a state of physical, mental and spiritual tranquility. To me it means BALANCE, so balance, particularly length/strength balance in soft tissues, is our goal. A BALANCED BODY DOES NOT HURT.
In this series I will show you the tests you will need to make an accurate assessment of your patient's structural deviations and functional abnormalities. Then I will demonstrate the proper corrections together with movements and exercises for the patient to do at home in order to maintain healthful balance.
The three components of ONSEN® are Muscle Energy Technique (standard MET and variations of MET which I have discovered through research, clinical experience, and trial and error), Post Isometric Relaxation and Transverse Friction Massage.
MET is rapidly gaining popularity among Osteopathic and Chiropractic physicians as well as massage and physical therapists. The principles of MET are universal in application and far reaching in therapeutic value. MET is very exciting because it gives us tools we never had before:
1. Accurate Assessment
2. Skeletal repositioning with Minimum Effort
3. Simple and Painless Correction
4. Provision of Long Term Relief
5. A way to address Individual Spinal Segments
6. Many New Corrective Techniques. (In Volume 1, I will show you five new techniques for the SI joint alone, six for the sacrum,
and two for rotating individual spinal segments.)
7. Correction of Larger Regional Spinal Curves
Another beauty of ONSEN® is that it can be incorporated into your present practice without requiring you to give up or dramatically change what you are doing now. My hope is that each of you will use these techniques of structural and functionally correction in an integrated manner.
Most of the clients you treat will be seeking relief from pain. As healing artists, all of us should learn as much as possible about the factors which both create and perpetuate painful soft tissue stresses. Although these techniques have certainly withstood the test of time, the concepts and treatment techniques will be new to some of you. Each, however, is thoroughly illustrated and explained. All the correction procedures are easy to master.
The video tapes and workbooks are the result of hours of preparation. They are the highest quality. Both are organized and coded in a manner which will let you move smoothly from start to finish.
I am so convinced of the value of this series I will guarantee your satisfaction. If you feel like you did not get your money's worth just send the material back within 30 days for a full refund.
Finally we, as healing artists, have the tools to actually accomplish what we have been striving toward for a long time. I am not interested in making patients better as I am in making them WELL.
Sincerely,
Rich Phaigh
