What is Visceral Manipulation?

Visceral Manipulation therapy is a gentle hands-on approach that helps your body restore motion to areas of pain and compensation. It targets your body’s own healing abilities instead of forcing changes that could cause your body more irritation. As these restrictions begin to improve, areas of your body begin to relax, and health begins to return to your tissues. 

This type of manual therapy based on the work of Jean Pierre Barral, a Doctor of Osteopathy and Physical Therapist in France. Through decades of research and clinical study, he has developed these Manual Techniques to address adhesions and lack of motion inside the body that create pain, symptoms and disease.

The term “disease” translates literally to tell us that when the body is not healthy, there is “dis-ease” — or lack of freedom for the body and its tissues to move and function in harmony. Manual therapy, as a means to help change these areas of tension, has been part of health care for thousands of years, long before modern surgery and medications became available. Dr. Barral has brought together an exceptional anatomical knowledge with extensive clinical experience to develop a better and more precise form of manual therapy, now called “Visceral Manipulation”.

Think about how pain causes you to move a certain body part (or parts) less. From the simplest motions of breathing, to the more complex movements involved in playing sports, the internal part of your body is required to move freely. Without this freedom, your body will compensate and tighten to prevent damage. As tensions increase in number or over a period of time, your body becomes less able to remain healthy without increased effort or restriction of motion, diminishing your health prematurely.

These changes are all too familiar to most of us, in ourselves or friends and family members. With time, these symptoms begin to further manifest or intensify if not addressed.

Visceral Manipulation targets your body’s own healing abilities instead of forcing changes that could cause your body more irritation. As the compensations and motions begin to improve, areas of your body begin to loosen, and health begins to return to your tissues. A person is a “whole organism” made up of many systems. Treating this whole organism requires an approach that integrates all the tissues of the body.

For example: consider back pain. Visceral Manipulation will help address the root cause of your back pain, allowing your nervous system to stop telling your muscles to tighten, thus limiting your spine’s motion and increasing tightness and pain. This allows your trunk to move more easily, which in turn improves digestion and ease of breathing. With improved breathing and blood flow throughout your body, a better level of health and less back pain can be achieved.