When Your Adjustment Keeps Coming Undone — Maintenance Is Half the Treatment

When Your Adjustment Keeps Coming Undone — Maintenance Is Half the Treatment

You get a chuna adjustment and it clearly feels better — then a few days on, it is back to how it was. Sound familiar?

There is a reason it keeps coming undone. And the reason isn't that the adjustment went wrong — it is that the tissue is built that way. Let me talk about why, and what changes once you know it.

The body returns to the posture it knows

The body remembers the posture it has held for years as "normal." Muscle and fascia have stiffened to fit that shape. Correct the alignment and, if the surrounding tissue still remembers the old shape, the body drifts back to what it knows.

So one adjustment doesn't finish it. Until the stiffened tissue learns the new alignment as "normal," it takes repetition and maintenance.

Coming undone is actually a property of the tissue

The thixotropic chuna I practise uses the property by which stiff tissue softens, releasing the tissue itself as the alignment is restored. Because the adjustment happens with the tissue released, the body takes to the new alignment better than it would if adjusted stiff.

But thixotropy is, by its nature, "softens with stimulus, thickens again when left." Stir thick honey and it loosens; leave it and it goes stiff again. So the fact that what you released comes back is not a failure. It is how the thing is made.

Once you know that, the answer is clearer. There is no method for making it not come back. Release it more often than it takes to return, and change the day that stiffens it.

Which is why maintenance is half the treatment

Along with the adjustment, I always go over how to hold the state.

• Postural habits. How you sit when you sit long, and which of your frequent movements twists you back.
• Simple movement. Undemanding work that wakes the muscles that will hold the new alignment.
• A rhythm of care. Often at first, then further apart as things settle.

The adjustment sets the direction; maintenance writes that direction into the body. Both together are what gets you out of the "only better while I'm being treated" pattern. If your pain keeps returning because of your body shape, treating adjustment and maintenance as one package is the way to break the loop.

References

• Confirmed in human wrists: a muscle that has been released returns to how it was while at rest — Journal of Physiology, 2001
• Restricting movement alone reduced how far fascia slid against itself by about 28% (controlled experiment) — PLOS ONE, 2016

Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young (PhD in Korean Medicine Pathology, Kyung Hee University · former Research Professor of Herbology, Kyung Hee University)