by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
The pathways for pain transmission are complex. Generally, nociceptive information (pain-info) reports external and internal representation of the body’s physiological condition through two different components: The sensory-discriminative component, transmitted...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the current series of posts I’ll be discussing the treatment of pain and how this creates difficulties for effective assessment, using the SOAP method for doctors’ diagnosis. It seems though that before becoming fully immersed in these discussions, it would be...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In my last post I discussed the difficulties pain posed for effective assessment, given its subjective character, and how addressing pain first was the prime directive in my practice. Perhaps the most effective way of addressing the multifactorial,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Continuing with our discussion of the role of assessment in the doctor’s SOAP interview, I want to return to a topic discussed before: the character of pain. Pain is a good example of the conundrum doctors’ face with regard to “assessment.” The experience of pain is...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Everyone has that still quiet voice inside them, and it speaks constantly. Amidst the noise and chaos of the world, people turn their focus on other things. Like ghosts, they walk around never truly connecting with themselves. They exist in a space between needless...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
If you are in a continual state of stress, like in PTSD, this greatly affects your interoceptive ability. To foster interoceptive accuracy, it is important to move the client from a sympathetic state into a parasympathetic or vagal state, which is what happens with...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
It is often stated that pain is an illusion. If your brain never perceived it, it never happened. However, it is inflammation that accounts for the chemical reactions and cascades that occur at the site of injury or irritation… whereas PAIN is a perception,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
The therapeutic goal is to have our ANS experience that the trauma is over by experiencing a state of safety and calm for repair, restoration and rest. There are a myriad of symptoms that the body adopts in chronic pain syndromes such as anxiety, learned...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
Pain is a construct of the brain. Pain is created in order to protect us, and yet the key is to understand the mechanism of pain. Only then can you overcome it. Contrary to what you might believe about pain, there are no pain signals being sent to your brain. Instead,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Since the World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus a Pandemic, everyone has been inundated with news, perhaps some misinformation. It’s only natural that your uncertainty, stress and anxiety are running high. How, then, are you to remain grateful, calm,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
EDWARD’S STORY, A SURGEON & A CLIENT ~ How BowenFirst™ Therapy helped him after seven years of excruciating and life-altering pain: Seven years before I met Edward, he had surgery to remove a brain tumor. His surgery lasted more than eight hours. Here is an...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
Trapped in gray cubicles, the average worker sits hunched over a desk all day. As time passes, there’s a crick in the neck, stiffness in the joints and pain all over. Yet like the artificial lights above, this becomes a “normal” part of everyday life. Most people have...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
There’s a pill for everything. Yet nobody seems to be getting better. Modern society wants everything fast, and they want everything right now — fast cars, fast food, and fast relief from pain. Like instant coffee, the convenience of a pill seems like the...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
“Oh, you didn’t sleep last night? That’s nothing. I’ve been working overtime for three days in a row.” Some people treat their pain like battle scars. They try to prove themselves by powering through the day. When they’re tired, they take caffeine. When they’re sick,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
If you are in a continual state of stress, like in PTSD, this greatly affects your interoceptive ability. To foster interoceptive accuracy, it is important to move the client from a sympathetic state into a parasympathetic or vagal state, which is what happens with...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In a previous post, I discussed one of the consequences of the war on symptoms: the over-reliance on cortisone shots, which create a false sense of security often leading to a “re-injury” of the original problem. Though really it’s more of an aggravation of the...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
The recent few posts here told a personal story about how I discovered firsthand the importance of not treating an injury and its pain as mere symptoms, but allowing a deeper personal, subjective experience to emerge. This is the key lesson I have been trying to...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
The BowenFirst™Technique is a body manipulation therapy that uses very gentle pressure to stimulate the brain to reboot the body. Oftentimes, the most common approaches to stress management just don’t work and when they do, they don’t have long lasting results for the...
