88: What is Frequency Specific Microcurrent (with Shannon Goossen)
Episode Transcript
Whitney talks with massage therapist and acupuncture physician Shannon Goossen about Frequency Specific Microcurrent (FMS). You may have never heard of FMS, but practitioners like our guest report impressive results with a variety of soft-tissue disorders. Could this approach be an adjunct to your practice? Key points include:
- What is FSM?
- How does it work?
- What kinds of conditions can it best be used for?
- Are there limitations on who can use it?
- The value of neurological examinations
- An exploration of the Functional NeuroMyofascial Techniques
- …much more
- Til Luchau’s Advanced-Trainings.com
- Whitney Lowe’s Academy of Clinical Massage
Resources:
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner Podcast.
Til Luchau:
A podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions, and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today.
Whitney Lowe:
I’m Whitney Lowe.
Til Luchau:
And I’m Til Luchau.
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.
Til Luchau:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner, where are a podcast is supported by ABMP, the Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package, including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with PocketSuite and much more. ABMP’s CE courses podcast and the Massage and Body Work Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including those from Til and myself, Whitney. So Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking.
The show is also sponsored this week by the Academy of Clinical Massage, where our mission is to help you become a better practitioner working with pain and injury conditions. You know it’s challenging to find high quality training in your location when you need it, and our purpose and our mission is to bring exceptional orthopedic massage training to the comfort of your home through our innovative online programs so you can learn anytime, anywhere, and immediately help more of your clients. You can learn more about those programs at academyofclinicalmassage.com/specials. Til is still off on his teaching trip to Asia, so today I have the great fortune to be joined by Shannon Goossen for what I’m going to call an electrifying discussion here. You’ll see more about that in a moment here. So Shannon, welcome to The Thinking Practitioner and you can take a few minutes, if you will, to tell our listeners a bit about your background, what you do and what you’re up to.
Shannon Goossen:
Thank you, and thank you so much for inviting me to come on your podcast. It’s just such a great service that you offer to manual therapists, massage therapists, people that are doing any structural work. So it’s terrific to be here. I’m honored and-
Whitney Lowe:
I was trying to remember when was the last time you and I saw each other? Because we’ve known each other for a while, but I’m thinking-
Shannon Goossen:
It has.
Whitney Lowe:
… it had to have been at least a decade or so since I saw you.
Shannon Goossen:
It was, and I feel like I might have seen you at one of the Fascia Congresses or one of the big national meetings.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, I think it was FSMTA possibly down in Florida in your neck of the woods when we-
Shannon Goossen:
Yes, and I was there with Judi DeLany. Yeah, that was-
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
Gosh. So many different meetings and so long ago, so this is-
Whitney Lowe:
Yes, indeed. Right.
Shannon Goossen:
… this is a delight. Thank you.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, great. So anyway, sorry to interrupt you with that. Tell us about-
Shannon Goossen:
It’s okay.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Tell us about what you’re up to, who you are and a little on your background here.
Shannon Goossen:
So I am a massage therapist and also an acupuncture physician. I have been in private practice since 1996 and most of my work right now revolves around traveling and teaching and doing private work within other clinics and doing work for the military. But I had this most unusual entry into this world, and it was from the medical side. I had the great fortune of meeting Dr. Janet Travell when she was still alive, so she was-
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, wow.
Shannon Goossen:
… this influencer. And I actually knew Janet Travell was trying to get an interdisciplinary pain clinic put together in Jacksonville, Florida in the 1990s and so I actually knew her before I even went to school.
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, wow. Huh.
Shannon Goossen:
I met Janet. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I totally know what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life.” It was profound in that in the 1990s no one really knew what myofascial pain and dysfunction was, and so I was just right at the beginning of it. I referred to it as I got to be part of the Myofascial Mafia. There was like about 50 of us. So that’s how I came into this world of manual therapy and medicine, and I really wasn’t in practice for even a year and I knew that if I was going to be effective, I had to be able to treat perpetuating factors because that’s what Janet, Dr. Travell, had taught me and was like, “Don’t even bother to treat the muscles unless you’re going to do perpetuating factors.” And I live in Florida. In Florida being an acupuncture physician is primary care for the most part from a Chinese medicine standpoint. So I can order imaging, I can do lab tests, I can do lifestyle, I can do functional medicine, I can do nutrition, any aspect of what I needed to do to really holistically treat someone from a functional medicine perspective.
In Florida, I’m primary care where I can do all of that, Whitney. So it just allowed my career to blossom. And while I was in acupuncture school, that’s when I got introduced to frequency specific microcurrent because I was working with two integrative functional medicine physicians and they both were acupuncturists and had gone through classical acupuncture training. While I was in that clinic, that’s when I got introduced to frequency specific microcurrent from Dr. Shirley Hartman who had gone out to train with Carolyn McMakin. And then I’m like, “Oh, well, this just fits right in because Dr. Travell totally believed in microcurrent.”
So I invited Carolyn McMakin along with Shirley, and we put together a training in Jacksonville, Florida, and I started my vertical learning curve on frequency specific microcurrent and energy medicine and it just fit in perfectly and beautifully for what I was doing and there’s lots of funny stories that go with that. That’s where all of it came together at the same time for me, and I really, really have had this eclectic, unusual training because I was also in the world of orthopedic spine surgery and neurology, functional medicine, internal medicine, clinical psychology, neuropsychology, biofeedback.
I was working with the two leaders in surface EMG and neurofeedback. I had no idea then how magical it would be that I had this amazing training. Then guess who ended up in my life in 1999 of all things was Thomas Myers. So Tom Myers actually ended up being a keynote speaker for NMPT convention that I was hosting in Jacksonville because my prior speaker wasn’t able to come. He had just published in the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies, the Anatomy Trains Theory. So then now it was just building out where I had all aspects of it. So that’s my eclectic training. Judy DeLany and I are very, very dear friends and along with Leon Chaitow, I got to publish in a textbook for her. I published in books on myofascial pain and dysfunction, and then written a lot of articles and published cases and just all the intriguing stuff around the edges and how it fits it for what all of us are doing.
Whitney Lowe:
It’s an absolutely fascinating story. One of the things that struck me about this, and Til and I have talked about this a couple of times, of the incredible luck that many of us have of being immersed in a particular talent vortex at a time. It sounds like you had that opportunity to have some incredibly influential and talented people come around at the right times for you to help open some doors and send you on some various different paths in that direction. Yeah. Well, of course, the first place that I want to start and show my ignorance around this whole topic and many of our listeners probably also want to know what is frequency specific microcurrent? Can you give me kind of like a bare bones CliffNotes kind of version of what this is and then we’ll delve into this in a little bit more detail?
Shannon Goossen:
So in a nutshell, number one, it’s microcurrent, which means that it’s current being delivered to your body in a millionth of an ampere. So that’s what microcurrent means. Because it’s a millionth of an ampere, it’s subs-sensory so you can’t feel it. Forms of microcurrent and using frequencies have been around for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And with frequency specific microcurrent, it’s because it is two channels. So you’ve got channel one and channel two, and you run different frequencies on those two channels. The background behind it is the way these frequencies come in, is everything vibrates, everything has a frequency, and everything has a specific frequency in this universe that makes it what it is. So there’s specific frequencies for conditions or issues and tissues, which we run on channel one and then there’s very specific frequencies for conditions or tissues that run on channel two.
When you combine those two frequencies together, you can treat an issue in a tissue, which is how I refer to it. So frequency specific microcurrent is a art form treatment modality that when you really understand what is going on with someone and you know the upstream problem, the story behind the story behind the story, it can actually run all these frequency combinations to neutralize those problems or to enhance something like wound healing. So that’s microcurrent in a nutshell. It’s an FDA regulated device. It’s under a 510(K). I’ve been doing frequency specific microcurrent for 20 years now, and it’s highly, highly effective, especially when we’re treating the nervous system.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, so let me backtrack on a couple of things there. So not necessarily you, but how does an individual, how did the researchers, the people look into this figure out or find out what the various frequencies were associated with different tissues? How did that sort of come about?
Shannon Goossen:
So that’s the sticking point for a lot of people, Whitney. And that’s because the frequencies were handed down, and I’ve got books from the 1800s from Dr. Miller when they were doing radionics and other types of frequency work. These frequencies have been around for a very, very long time, over a hundred years. And they have been tested by practitioners. So this is a in-the-trenches kind of testing where you’ve got thousands of practitioners that have used the same frequency combinations and they do the same thing in any person depending on what that is. So now there’s been a lot of it where it’s just empirical data that we have on what always works, and so we have very specific protocols that we use because of that.
So we don’t know where these frequencies came from by any means or how they were figured out. What we do know is that the research that has been done has demonstrated over and over again that specific frequencies have specific effects. And if you use, I’m going to call them dummy frequencies, so they would be frequencies for something else, they have no effect. So from a research standpoint, people like Vivian Reeve, who was the first one to test the inflammation frequencies demonstrated in four minutes that you could reduce inflammation by nearly 70%. Every single time they did it in the animal trials that happened and it had to be the specific frequencies. Then we had the same thing happen with treating the spinal cord. That research was done from just this brilliant, brilliant Terry Phillips researcher immunologist at NIH. He was willing to do those blood samples on people. Same thing happened with every single person, the inflammatory cytokines reduced by a logarithmic factor of 10 in 90 minutes, which is kind of medically impossible, but it happened in every single patient.
So we’ve gotten that kind of research. Denise Curtis, who you may know, she’s a physiotherapist. She’s over in Ireland, and she had worked with John Sharkey at the National Training Center, so she was an instructor. She’s been using Microcurrent for two decades also. She’s the one that did the controlled study on delayed onset muscle soreness, and she was able to demonstrate that very, very specific frequencies just annihilated delayed onset muscle soreness. So we don’t know where they came from, but people have been able to test them and there’s more research going on now. So we know that they work, we just don’t know the mechanism exactly.
Whitney Lowe:
Interesting. Would the frequencies be more region specific or more tissue centered? Now this may not be a good kind of question to ask, but just for example, let’s say you have a tendon problem or a tendon disorder and your rotator cuff tendons versus your Achilles tendon, would the frequencies that you would use be more aimed at a particular frequency for tendons or more like a frequency for shoulder versus foot and ankle region?
Shannon Goossen:
So it’s tissue type, so you got it exactly right, Whitney. It would be the frequency for tendon, which is 191 by the way, on channel two.
Whitney Lowe:
I’ll remember that.
Shannon Goossen:
But then there’s also a frequency specifically to the whole shoulder girdle and for the leg muscle. And then this is where you will love this part of it, Whitney, just because of what you do from a standpoint of your orthopedic background. You and I are passionate about neurology and I am neurology girl with all of it. So these frequencies actually teach you to be a much better thoughtful thinking practitioner because you have to think about every single tissue type that might be involved and then why it might be involved and then what was the mechanism of injury and then what’s the other stuff upstream. So becoming a practitioner, a frequency specific microcurrent makes you a really, really savvy thinking, thoughtful therapist.
Whitney Lowe:
So is that in order to be able to choose the correct frequencies for your treatment? Is that why that is so important to really-
Shannon Goossen:
That’s right.
Whitney Lowe:
… identify and zero in on this?
Shannon Goossen:
Because if you use a frequency that is not the problem, it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work, nothing happens until you get on the right frequency. And we’ve got some clever ways to test them. I can tell you this funny story real quickly about this from my early years to demonstrate this. So when I had my big clinic, I had a big 3000 plus square foot clinic, interdisciplinary, doctor of oriental medicine, herbology, massage therapy, physical therapy, Pilates, all of it. So I had such a wonderful time working with the physical therapist who did Pilates, and she and I shared these two sisters. They were twins. And what was great about the twins is whenever something happened with one of them, I always knew what I was going to need to do with the other one because they seemed to always have the same things coming up, which was hilarious.
So one of the twins was in, and she had had this ongoing knee problem and I’d been running the microcurrent and I’d been running my knee protocol and it just wasn’t working. She said, “I know this works for my sister, but this just doesn’t work for me.” And I’m like, “Well, actually it does work. I just don’t know what’s wrong and I’m not using the right frequencies.” So I said, “Hang on a minute.” I go running across the hallway and I said, “Eileen, can you come over here and take a look at this for me for a minute, please? Do you mind?” She’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come over.” So she goes across into my hall room and I’m like, “Look at that knee. I want you to tell me every single tissue that you can think of that has to do with that knee.”
She’s like, “Well, you’ve got the skin and the fascia, this periosteum and then you’ve got the bone for the kneecap and there’s ligaments, and then there’s muscles, and then you’ve got fat pads.” And I’m like, “Ah, fat pad. Oh my gosh, there’s fat pads.” So I go running down the hallway and I reprogram my device on my computer because we can put in all these protocols and I go running back down the hallway and I said, “I’m not going to tell you what I did.” I put the device on her and I said, “I’ll be back in 15 minutes.” And so I just leave the room because I don’t want to be in there. Then I come back and I said, “Okay, get up.” She gets up and she just was like, “I don’t have any knee pain.” And the knee pain was just gone. It was the fat pads. So going forward, then we made sure everybody had the frequencies for the fat pads in their protocols. So that’s how specific it is. And so for her, because she’d been down on her knees and doing things, she actually had inflamed fat, which we know can get inflamed, and that was the driver of the pain.
Whitney Lowe:
Interesting.
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah, and I’m thinking probably some of your viewers are light bulbs going off because I think what happens for all of us is all of a sudden when you have a new modality or a tool, we have all these things in school that we were told, it’s like, “Well, don’t worry about that because there’s nothing you can do about it.” Or “We really don’t have anything we can do about this or that or whatever.” And now all of a sudden I have this tool and it doesn’t matter what is wrong, I can find the frequency for it and address it. So now it’s like there’s no limits for what I can do in my treatment room with my patients.
Whitney Lowe:
Tell me what kinds of things you’ve found that work best or most effectively versus some of those things that seem to be a bit more challenging sometimes in getting them to work?
Shannon Goossen:
Huge, huge Cheshire grin on my face because this is going to shock everybody probably. The easiest thing for me to treat is fibromyalgia from a inflamed spinal cord from the neck. So my specialty is full body pain from fibromyalgia, and that’s because if people have had a neck injury, they end up with inflammation in the spinal cord and the spinal cord inflammation changes the conductivity in those anterior lateral tracts, especially when you’ve got a disc and an annular tear and Phospholipase A2 spilling out and inflaming it. We’ve got frequencies to calm all of that down. I can take someone from a 9 out of 10 pain down to a 0, 1, 2 in 90 minutes.
Whitney Lowe:
So this has got me thinking here too about those kinds of — especially fibromyalgia certainly falls into this perspective for many individuals — but those kinds of chronic pain complaints that nobody can seem to figure out. How do you go about doing that? How do you go about figuring those things out and finding the solution for them?
Shannon Goossen:
So my secret sauce is that — and this is what I started teaching at the annual meetings in 2012 — you always treat the nervous system. And guess what? As a massage therapist, I could treat trigger points, and as an acupuncturist, I could dry needle trigger points and I could calm down all this noxious stimulus going in through the afferent into the spinal cord and annoying it and annoying the brain. But I didn’t have a way to calm down the nervous system directly. We’ve got frequencies specifically for the spinal cord, specifically for the brainstem, specifically for the nerves. And I can calm down that inflammation in those structures very, very fast. So another funny story along that. So the easy stuff is the nervous system and those frequencies, you can take them to the bank. In my early years of doing this, I was the myofascial pain and dysfunction expert in Jacksonville, and the doctors would always send me these complex myofascial pain places, and then I would take care of the problem and then I would send them back and send a note and say, “It’s not myofascial pain. It was coming from the spinal cord. This person has a neck injury, this person has X, Y, and Z.”
So I had two years in the early years of doing this where I didn’t see anybody that had myofascial pain, Whitney, they all had inflammation in their nervous system driving this myofascial pain and dysfunction. So for a while I’m like, “Oh my gosh, maybe there is not anything such as myofascial pain and dysfunction.” Of course there is because those people all came back eventually after I got my vertical learning curve on the spinal cord. We all know about that. It’s like, “Oh, it’s going to be shoulder weak. Everybody’s coming in with shoulder problems this week. I wonder when I’m going to learn.” So I had two years of nervous system, and then that is really what drove my vertical learning curve on addressing the nervous system. So nervous system is the sweet spot in treating any kind of new injury. So for all the dancers I took care of and all of the sports people, I could heal a fracture in two weeks mediographically. I mean, we knew because they would go back in for injury. So getting things to heal at lightning speed, it’s like Star Trek tricorder.
Whitney Lowe:
How many of these and how frequent do these treatments need to be in order for having that kind of success with them?
Shannon Goossen:
So when you’re dealing with a new injury, we want to be running microcurrent anywhere from two to six to 10 hours a day after a surgery or a fracture, severe sprain or any of that. We want the frequencies on there as often as possible. They’re very, very specific protocols with very specific waveforms. But it’s all press and go because the frequency combinations are done for you and you just hit start and the protocol runs. So those are intense. When we’re dealing with some of these other chronic pain problems, and then the nervous system, it can be anywhere from one to two appointments, literally up to five or six. And then for some people, because they have an orthopedic injury that isn’t going away and something really bad has happened and they’ve had a lot of surgery, then we can get it settled down and then they can do maintenance and people just end up owning their own devices.
Whitney Lowe:
So when you talk about these really long treatment protocols, are people wearing something or how are they doing that? I’m assuming they’re not sitting in the bed for 10 hours or something.
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah, I’ve got the device. Can I hold the device up?
Whitney Lowe:
Oh yeah, we’re on video here, so do that. Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
So this is how small the device is, and then there’s conductive pads, and then you just wrap those in damp paper towels or you use sticky pads. So after a surgery we use sticky pads, AND then for my patients I’ve got-
Whitney Lowe:
For those listeners who are only listening and not seeing this, the box that you held up was about three inches by six. Would that be accurate?
Shannon Goossen:
It’s the size of a smartphone.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay, yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
And then it’s about three quarters of an inch thick.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Okay.
Shannon Goossen:
So it fits in the fanny packs that are designed for iPhones or phones where you can run wires if you’re listening to it. I’ll hold this up. So I have all of these fanny packs that I put the device in, and then people that can just wear these. Then we have people do that in the clinic because I’ll treat people dynamically while they’re using the microcurrent. So when I started, the unit that I had to use was the size of a toaster oven that you would have on the countertop and it weighed about eight pounds and you had to punch in all of the frequencies individually. So you really, really had to want to do it in the early years, and once you got the results, you really wanted to do it. It was very, very easy for patients to do that.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Ballpark idea, how much would one of these devices cost for a patient to be using this?
Shannon Goossen:
So when patients purchase these devices, they’re anywhere from… For the military it’s $1950, and then they go up to $3,000 usually depending on who the practitioner and the doctor is. And I’m going to just make a quick disclaimer right now, Whitney. I have absolutely nothing to do with any device companies at all. I have no financial arrangements with any device companies, actually any kind of industry at all. I have no financial relationships with any kind of industries or any of the devices that I use in my practice.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Okay. So you’re device-agnostic in that respect?
Shannon Goossen:
I am. When I teach, what happens is I will bring out all of my different devices because there’s other devices that I use that had sweet spots, so to speak.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. So this is one of the things I’m curious about too and I’m assuming some things about some of the legal parameters here. Are there legal limits to being able to practice this in different states here in the US? And I don’t know if you know anything else about outside the country as well.
Shannon Goossen:
Yes, there is. So depending on what state you’re in, you would have to check your practice act. If you are an LMT, in Florida, LMTs are able to do any kind of microcurrent as long as they are trained. So they’ve taken training and they have a certificate of completion. And in Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky’s almost there. I think there’s a couple of other states, and then there’s other places where you can work under someone. And then there’s other states where it doesn’t say specifically that you can’t, so you can provided that you have training where they say you have to practice within your scope of license and training. So some states where people might not be able to use this at all. Florida is a highly dense state of practitioners.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. I want to go back to something that you said originally too in your initial bio — that you’ve been doing some work with the military. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve been doing and some of the things that you’ve learned and found out from those explorations as well?
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah. So in 2018, I was invited by a physician that I had been working with that had been securing funding to do a demonstration project for the Air Force and I was invited to be the lead instructor for frequency specific microcurrent, and then also ended up teaching my manual therapy skills. So it was just a demonstration for four and a half months. I went on the base and to the hospital about every two to three weeks. And then we would train doctors, practitioners, and then I would be in the hospital with the docs or in the family residency, family practice clinics and working side by side with the doctors and demonstrating with patients. By the end of that demonstration, the training room was standing room only because what they had decided to do was just bring me the most impossible patients in the hospital that no one had been able to help.
That also was like it just took the air out of the doctors when they were on the schedule because it’s like when you can’t help someone, it really, really takes the air out of this. And I’m like, “Okay, I will just see all of those people.” I was basically 95% if someone would just say I was a hundred percent on what I did. So the rumor mill got out about that and everybody there was actually able to reproduce those results, and I was able to work with the docs on reading their own imaging and MRIs and reminding them to do neurological exams and thinking upstream like you and I would Whitney. Then they just got these amazing results and so the person who was the program director in the colonel who was the head of all of it said, “Yeah, we have never ever had these kinds of results with doing anything in the clinic, and this is transformational.”
So they then secured over time, I think now it’s over $3 million in funding for research and there has been ongoing research since 2019. I think our first paper is going to be out sometime this year. They were able to demonstrate that this absolutely changes quality of life and can reduce pain in people. And I’m going to put this in a kind way, you kind of don’t even have to know really what you’re doing if you just follow the algorithm of how to treat. So they have ongoing, ongoing, and they are doing many different types of energy medicine, but every time I interview them microcurrent and then doing the neural myofascial work and mover stabilizer, that is their bread and butter in the clinic and what works really, really fast.
Then from that, Walter Reed has had me coming in and teaching frequency specific microcurrent for the last three years. It’s in Cleveland Clinic. And then the Navy has had me come in and teach in multiple Air Force base. So there’s more and more adopting it and it’s great that it’s happening at the physician level that they are applying this. So there’s going to be more and more research, the one for inflammation and the spinal cord. That research is going to be redone I think this year where they’re collecting the cases on it. So there’s going to be a lot of research coming out over the next two years.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. In our previous episode last week, I had a wonderful conversation with Walt Fritz, and one of the things that we were talking about was silos and these sort of walls that are existing between us. I’m curious to hear, I mean this is some absolute fascinating stuff that you’ve been working on and of course getting some wonderful results with this process. Have you found any challenges in acceptance from physicians or other healthcare professionals outside of our field because of, I want to put this in air quotes, of being just a massage therapist or just on an acupuncture physician? Has that been a limitation?
Shannon Goossen:
So there is always going to be a percentage of practitioners, and this happens. It doesn’t matter if you’re at the biggest institutes — Stanford, Harvard — it doesn’t matter where it is, you’re always going to have these physicians and researchers who have their own bias. With that, there is no way to change that, Whitney. So there are always going to be these people and they’ve got their heels dug in, they have a bias, and there’s no way around it. What I started speaking on 10 years ago within my professional organizations and two physicians and practitioners is don’t use up your valuable energy trying to convince people you can’t convince because they’ve got a cognitive bias. There’s no way around it. Insular cortex, there’s no way around it.
With that being said, equally there’s all these people that are coming in that have seen these things happen, and the military especially is like, “Yeah, we are a feet-on-the-ground, get-the-job-done kind of people and we don’t necessarily have to have the mechanism. We just have to have the human study results. Once you show us the results, we’re good. We’ll eventually get to the research where we can figure it out. All you have to do is show us you can get results.”
So you’ve got a large, large number of physicians that are in that camp, and then you’ve got even… Especially I think physical therapists have probably been the most damaged with the cognitive bias on this because of evidence-based medicine. And then they are all like, “If you can’t show me the evidence, then we’re not going to talk about it.” You have to be able to do the research in order to get the evidence and then later on to get the mechanism. What’s always so funny when I tell them the five things they’re doing, which the evidence says doesn’t work, and then I ask them why are you doing it? They’ll tell me because the patient expects it. So there’s this somewhat of a double standard that can happen. So I don’t know if I really answered your question as well. There’s plenty of physicians, plenty of physicians in every walk that are happy to adopt this and do it. All they need to know is that it works. If it works, they’re in.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. I want to take a slightly different track now and also go back to something that you mentioned earlier that I had known from talking with you many, many years ago. That you had done some really specific stuff with trying to teach a bit more about neurological examination to massage therapists. Tell me a little bit more about that. What kind of things do you feel it’s really important for manual therapists to know about neurological examination?
Shannon Goossen:
Make sure you have a reflex hammer and learn how to do reflexes.
Whitney Lowe:
Ah-huh. Okay.
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah. My neurological exam class has an eight-hour version, a four-hour version, a three-hour version, and a two-hour version, so depending on what people need to learn. But I always teach neurological exam in any class I present. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, Whitney, I include it. And that’s because if you do and learn how to do a basic neurosensory exam where you are checking sensation, you are checking reflexes, you are checking muscle strength, and then there’s things that we can do cerebellar and things that have to do with the brainstem. In a day, anybody that’s never done a neurological exam can learn how to do this and I completely demystify the wiring. I make it super, super easy to learn all of it. In fact, in every class I’ve ever taught, after two minutes, after two minutes after I show people, they all have their dermatomes memorized for the upper and lower.
Whitney Lowe:
That’s excellent.
Shannon Goossen:
Two minutes and they can do it. And it’s through repetition. I just make it easy.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
I did it in a very, very organized way and then in context. So I want ideally every practitioner to be doing that because the nervous system will tell you how it is and what’s going on, and you can very, very quickly figure out what might be happening with someone and then you also have objective information where you can actually track what’s changing with the nervous system. So once you get good at it, you can do that entire neurosensory exam, upper and lower, in less than 10 minutes. It’s not time-consuming, and you’ll be tickled to know this. When I teach at a lot of these bigger meetings, it’s not uncommon that there’s more physicians in my class than there are therapists because what I found out from all of the physicians is they learned it to pass the test and then they don’t remember it.Then they don’t do it and then as massage therapist, we are counting on the family practice doctor, the integrative medicine doctor, the internal medicine, the whoever doctor, even the pain management doctor to have done that neuro exam and know that there’s not something more sinister. They just don’t remember how to do it and they don’t do it.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, interesting.
Shannon Goossen:
Physicians love it when they get information back that says, “I did a neuro exam sensory exam. This is my clinical impression in what I found. Can you please check this for me?” You’re not making a diagnosis, you’re just saying, “These were my findings. I thought you might like to know and maybe check this, however it needs to be stated.” But most physicians have forgotten how to do that neuro exam, and most of them have told me that, “Well, there’s not anything we can do about it anyway, Shannon. So what’s the point?” And then if we think there’s something wrong, we just refer them out. But you send someone to a neurologist and oftentimes they aren’t… I’ve had many, many patients… I’m going to backtrack. I’ve had many patients come back to me that have been to the neurologist and when I do my neurosensory exam and I ask, “What did the neurologist say when he found XY?” It’s like, “Oh, well, they didn’t do this exam on me.” So even at the neurologist, they are not getting a neurosensory exam reliably.
Whitney Lowe:
What do you think is the reason for that? I mean, I have some opinions about that because I’ve seen this over and over again in the world of orthopedics and what I’ve found to be very incomplete and non-comprehensive exams in patient intake processes. What’s your take on why that happens?
Shannon Goossen:
I’ve got a little bit of an inside line because I live on that side of the railroad track also because I lived in the world of neurosurgery, spine surgery, orthopedic surgery, all of it. So what I do know is they’re pressed for time because it is an industry that is controlled by a third party payer, by the insurance company who dictates how much time they’re allowed to have with a patient. The patient doesn’t dictate what they need, the insurance company dictates as a payer, so that creates a constraint in the office. The next thing that happens is they’re being looked at as you either need surgery or you don’t need surgery, this is a critical problem or it’s not a critical problem. So it’s gotten where it’s more back black or white, do I need to brace you, cast you or operate on you or immobilize you? Do we have something urgent? And even sometimes they miss that.
So they don’t bother unless it’s taking them down the path to do one of these more intense interventions that they’re going to refer out to. They have very cursory tests that they do. So for instance, neurology, if you can walk in and you can walk on your heels and toes and clap your hands over your head, you’re good to go because they assume that if you can do those things, there’s not anything that could be wrong. But they will miss numbness. Yeah, it’s really kind of scary. I mean, I’ve had some really, really serious things that massage therapists found that the physicians missed by doing that. Judy DeLany, one of them, Judy diagnosed a family member over the phone after she had been through my neurology class and learned about cauda equin and it was a family member, and she did what I told her to over the phone.
You know if you need to have someone check, that person needed to have urgent surgery and Judy was the one that diagnosed it. She didn’t diagnose. Judy was the one that sorted it out over the phone and made all of the right things happen. So when I’ve got all kinds of testimonials from therapists where that have happened. So we’ve got money, we’ve got time, we’ve got, again, a bias on it’s either something serious or not. If it’s not serious, I’m not going to waste my time figuring it out or I’m just going to refer out. I think those are the big buckets of the drivers.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
What do you think, Whitney? What do you think is going on?
Whitney Lowe:
I think there’s a lot of that. I think you really hit the nail on the head in my opinion and a lot of the time issue is just the pressures of moving this many people through here in this amount of time, and these are the tools that we’ve got to do this kind of thing. I mean, I’ve sat in on quite a number of patient intakes in the orthopedic world, and saw that doctors never touch their patients. And I’m including physical examination, not doing basic range of motion testing or basic palpation and things like that of just what seems to me to be really rudimentary fundamental skills associated with the evaluation process. We’ve just become so driven by a lot of the algorithms of, like you said, these are the things that channel us into this particular decision here. Okay, this is non-specific back pain, and so it’s that we can then take them or send them out the door to go see somebody else because of that.
Shannon Goossen:
Right. Yeah, it’s a lost art. It is, definitely. With that being said, is this not just such a wonderful, wonderful opportunity for all of us, Whitney? You have your training program to really raise up the profession and show these therapists, look, this is all the examination and testing and this is all the different things that we could ask the human body about what’s going on and it will give you the answer. You just have to ask the question and then I would say is like, “Wow.” So that’s the way medicine is. Okay, we’re not going to change it.
We could raise ourselves up, which is what you are doing with all of the training, and we can take on the burden of that testing for these physicians and other practitioners who don’t have the time because we do have the time. That’s what’s so powerful. We have the time to get to know who the person is with the problem and evaluate it. And then you become a incredibly valuable team member with these other practitioners that know that they can rely on you to do the work that they don’t have time to do or don’t want to do or whatever their particular driver is.
Whitney Lowe:
Right. I want to ask some more about also something else that you mentioned earlier and I’ve seen this in some of the things that you’d written about your mover stabilizer model and your kind of functional neural myofascial technique approach. Can you give me kind of a nutshell explanation of what that’s about?
Shannon Goossen:
So nutshell, that was my athletes and dancers that drove me figuring that out and learning it. And then I had frequency specific microcurrent so I could modulate the nervous system, which is why it’s neuro myofascial in my model. I was profoundly affected the first time I met Dr. Guimberteau who did strolling under the skin. So I met him back in like 2005, 2006 or 2207. He was at a low back and sacroiliac joint meeting with the Sacroiliac Joint Mafia. Diane Lee was there and she was one of the organizers for it. Bert Mooney maybe was there. So as soon as I saw his video on the fascia, it’s like the light bulb just went off and then it was reinforced later on from him on the three-dimensionality.
And so I do very, very different handholds with how I treat the tissue. I do not press into bone ever, I have people face up. But more importantly, it’s mover stabilizer because the one thing that was not in the Travell and Simon’s books and discussed was stabilization. So as massage therapists, we think about softening up muscles and stretching muscles out and if we could get rid of the tension. I’m using kind of this slang word, it’s not really what happens in the body, but I’m using the slang that we have. Then they’ll feel better treat to the trigger point, stretch the muscle, return it to its normal but resting length. So I realize that in the absence of stabilization, other muscles in the body have to take over for that. And the brain is smarter than all of us and the patient’s brain is way smarter than we are, and you don’t get a vote. And if the brain needs something to stabilize something, it’s going to use whatever is nearby and I’ve seen some very, very crazy patterns.
In the absence of having stabilizers turned on first, you will never get rid of a mover problem. So as an example, when I went to Body Worlds, I finally got it with the lower trapezius. This is how our patients come in. So for people that can’t see, I’ve got my shoulders shrugged up to my ears, my shoulders are earrings, and you will never ever get rid of that upper trapezius referral pain pattern, headache, tight shoulders until the lower trapezius turns on and the lower trapezius is the stabilizer of the shoulder girdle because it doesn’t cross the shoulder. So in that mover stabilizer model, I always turn on stabilizers and get them activated first and often time that takes care of the other muscle problems. It is the perpetuating factor that was never talked about in the myofascial pain and dysfunction books. So I-
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, how do you turn things on? I hear people using this phrase a lot, and I just want to get clear like are we-
Shannon Goossen:
And I don’t like turn on.
Whitney Lowe:
… talking about the same thing. Yes.
Shannon Goossen:
So I’m using slang words for the sake of people because it’s the language that we have. I think a lot of our language, and I correct the language for everybody when I teach, so there’s a new language for it, but you know who Thomas Hannah was, right?
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Somatics. Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he had this great line that he talked about motor sensory amnesia, right? Do you remember that?
Whitney Lowe:
Yes. Mm-hmm.
Shannon Goossen:
Okay. So here’s the translation of it. If you can’t feel it, you can’t find it. If you can’t feel it, you can’t find it because the brain is requiring afferent information. Again, we’re back to that darn nervous system. And if your brain had to take over another muscle, it is only aware of that and so you have to go in and then just tap on that lower trapezius so that people can find it in their motor sensory cortex. Then they’ve got to be able to start isolating that muscle and feel it again so they can find it, and then they feel what happens in their shoulder girdle. There’s five primary stabilizers that I work on, three right away in my classes. But this is what happened in the military because they were like, “Okay, Shannon, you’re doing the microcurrent. We see that. But then you do this other thing that we don’t understand what you’re doing, and it works really fast with the microcurrent.” And that was the functional neuro my fascial work. So then I taught all the physicians how to get their stabilizers on, and it just changed everything for what was happening with the patients.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, it sounds like there’s some similarities between what they write about and talk about with cortical smudging of just the patterns and the brain recognizing that sensory information in a really distorted sort of pattern. That often leads to pain being felt in other areas where it shouldn’t be, or unclear determination of where it’s coming from like, “I don’t know. My shoulder hurts, I can’t tell where it’s coming from.” That sort of thing.
Shannon Goossen:
Exactly.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
See, we’re back to that nervous system again. So everything goes back to the nervous system. But I mean, I’ve seen trigger points just instantaneously go away once I get stabilizers on. I work work with several people in the NFL and professional sports also and when there’s been injuries or concussions or anything, because we’re really good at treating concussions with microcurrent, this is where they know their stabilizer muscles aren’t working anymore or they were never working properly, and they get them on and then they aren’t just on fire. So with the microcurrent with this, for the last four years, the last four teams that have won the Super Bowl, and I really don’t… I’m not an advocate of football for a whole bunch of reasons, but for the last four years, those four teams have been using this technology in the locker room and to treat their injuries.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. So it’s something that’s getting battle tested in that kind of environment for sure.
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah. But the mover stabilizer, I mean, it’s the missing piece for all of us to get our stabilizer muscles on. I am passionate about teaching that and anybody can learn it, including people that don’t know anything about the body. That’s what’s been so magical about it is it doesn’t care what your training is.
Whitney Lowe:
Yes.
Shannon Goossen:
The more training you have and the more better it is for you. But if you know absolutely nothing, because these handholds are so different and it’s very, very forgiving when you do the techniques, you just have to be in the right zip code, as I call it. You just have to be in the right zip code. And if you know the real estate, you’re going to win on this and I teach people where the real estate is. Anybody can learn it, and then it doesn’t matter what your profession is. So I am teaching all professions and then also sports teams. I had one sports team learn it because they weren’t getting good care from physical therapy and the trainers, because they were the ugly redheaded stepchildren, and they had a 1% chance of winning the championship. I taught all of them how to get each other’s stabilizers on and their own stabilizers and take care of each other before they play and after. Their endurance went up, they ended up winning the championship that year.
Whitney Lowe:
Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Very incredible. So are some of these things that we’re talking about here with these pattern processes, you speak some in your writings about central pattern generators. Is that similar to what you’re talking about here, or is that something different?
Shannon Goossen:
Oh my gosh. Okay, so here’s the mindblower for everybody. Here’s the pearl of the day for all of you.
Whitney Lowe:
All right, I’m ready.
Shannon Goossen:
So far, this year was the first year that I was finally letting that come out with the training because I’ve been waiting for three years, and I was pretty certain that this was the underpinning of all of it, Whitney. I taught at Walter Reed, the acupuncture integrative medicine clinic and three other places all physicians. Not a single physician had ever heard this word before and they stumbled even trying to get it out. It’s like, “Now, what’s that word again?” So it’s central pattern Generators and central pattern generators are responsible for smooth rhythmic movement. They also control your breathing. They control everything. They allow you to move through the planet and your brain can be doing something else, and you don’t have to think about it. Central pattern generators are why you can drive home and not remember how you got there. So we had done just a tremendous amount of research since the forties, and it had to do with birds, rodents, all kinds of critters.
We figured it out mice with their whiskers. It’s a central pattern generator that causes those little whiskers to move. And it’s just been this year where the research that I really, really needed to have come out to just say, “Yeah, this is it.” It is the central pattern generator. So we have all these historic injuries. They affect our phylogenetic, okay? We are phylogenetically programmed to be able to walk, breathe, squat, run, do everything that we do automatically. When you’re one and you start walking, you don’t have to go to Pilates to learn how to do it. You don’t have to go to breathing school when you’re two. We don’t have to do any of this, it’s phylogenetically programmed in all of us. It’s just part of being human.
As Sherington said, the end of everything, the end stage for everything is movement for the nervous system. That is the final act of everything is movement. So when we have injuries, accidents, traumas, bad things happen, and the body has to make some kind of compensation for it — or adaptation, which what it really is, we adapt — it interferes with your phylogenetically programmed central pattern generators. I have figured out how to instantaneously change what is interfering with those central pattern generators and get you to go back to your factory default very fast.
Whitney Lowe:
This is absolutely fascinating work and fascinating ideas to discover. And again, I have to claim being a real newbie and fair amount of ignorance around this whole topic. So I really thank you so much for shedding some fascinating light and vision on this for us. I’m sure for many of our listeners, too, will be very curious to learn more about that. How can, Shannon, people find out more about you, your work, the things that you’re doing? Where’s the best place for them to connect with you?
Shannon Goossen:
So thank you, Whitney. So my training website — I have an online training platform, and then when we have live classes, those are posted there — is courses.frequenciesthatmend.com. So that is the training site. And then I can be reached by email also, [email protected]. How wonderful is that that I got myofascial.net 30 years ago or whatever it was. And so those are two ways. I think I told you I have a bit of an allergy to social media and I’m trying to get over that, and so I don’t-
Whitney Lowe:
That’s a healthy allergy in that respect.
Shannon Goossen:
Except that it is how we connect now.
Whitney Lowe:
It is.
Shannon Goossen:
It’s just accepting that this is how we connect now, and it’s not the best ideas that get out there, it’s the ideas that people know about that get out there. So if nobody knows what the ideas are, then there’s an impediment for getting them out there. Anyway, I’m working on that though, so I’m hard to find on any kind of social media, but I do have my training site.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay, good. Well, we will make sure that stuff makes it into the show notes so that other people can sort of follow along and look and see what you’re doing there, so yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
Yeah. For massage therapist, our next mover stabilizer class is going to be in Central Florida, and I think that is the third weekend in July is when we’re teaching that. And I’ll be hosting that class with Judith DeLany and Kathy Cohen from Beyond Trigger Points.
Whitney Lowe:
Wonderful. All right. That sounds great. Well, again, Shannon, thank you so much for being here with us on The Thinking Practitioner. I know our listener’s going to be really interested to dive into some of this stuff again. For me personally, it’s just wonderful to have a chance to have this chat with you and to connect again after such a long period of time here.
Shannon Goossen:
It is, Whitney.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Yeah.
Shannon Goossen:
Thank you so much for allowing me to come on your podcast and getting to talk with you finally. And thank you so much for what you have done for the industry and for the field, and for all of your effort for hosting this podcast, you and Til, to just really, really uplift everybody because this is what we need, and you have provided an amazing service to our manual therapy community. Thank you.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. All right, good. Well, thank you again so much. And to remind everyone, The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by Handspring Publishing. Their catalog has emerged as one of the leading collections of professional level books written especially for bodyworkers, movement teachers, and all professionals who use movement and touch with their patients to achieve wellness. Handspring has recently joined with Jessica Kingsley Publishers, their integrative health Singing Dragon imprint. So head on over to their website at handspringpublishing.com to check their list of titles. They’ve got some wonderful titles in that collection. And be sure to use the code TTP at checkout for a discount. So thanks again, Handspring. We would like to say a thank you to all of our listeners who’ve hung out with us, and also thank you to all the sponsors as always. You can stop by our sites for video, show notes, transcripts, and any extras.
You can find that over on my site at academyofclinicalmassage.com and over on Til’s site at advanced-trainings.com. So if you’ve got any questions or things that you’d like to hear us talk about, please feel free to email us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. You can look for us on social media under our names over there at Til Luchau for him and under me for Whitney Lowe on social as well. If you will, take a moment to rate us on the Apple Podcast, as it does help other people find the show, and you can hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcast, or wherever else you happen to listen. So please do share the word, tell a friend, and come hang out with us again, we’d love to share some more interesting thinking things with you all. Thanks again.
