Client unable to lift arm above head for last 5 years because of double mastectomy

New client arrived today.  We focused on her inability to use her shoulder and arm comfortably.  She had a double mastectomy 5 years ago due to breast cancer, and it began immediately after the surgery.  All the shoulder, upper chest, upper back muscles, and arm muscles down to her forearm felt tight and stiff.  They were always sore, and if she tried to raise her arm out to her sides side, she could only raise her right to the level of her shoulder.  If she tried to raise her arm straight upwards, she could but it would never be fully straight and it would lean out to the side.  Breast-stroke swimming motions were out of the picture.  Any of the movements caused her discomfort.  She had worked heavily with medical massage and chiropractic, and it would lessen everything for a day or so, but it would all then come back.

Muscle monitoring immediately showed she was having stress with her somatosensory system, which is part of your sensory nervous system that tells your brain what is happening to the inside and surface of your body.  Initially, stress was showing up with what are called Golgi Tendon Organs, which provide feedback on what is going on inside tendons. That ended up being a minor piece though.

After that, her body switched gears to the sensation of touch - specifically what are called cutaneous mechanoreceptors, which collect info on pressure against and distortions in skin.  This is where the really big stresses started showing up.  Her body needed more specific stresses to be accessed, so it pulled us into working with the neurological pathways involved in that.  We ended up destressing part of the Spinocerebellum pathways involved with unconscious non-discriminative touch (lets you sense that something has touched you, but you can't exactly tell where).  Her body identified the C8 spinal nerve as having lots of stress, which makes sense since that spinal nerve controls many of the muscles she was having issues with.  Even then her body needed us to access specific stresses involving the Nucleus Thoracicus of the spinal segment 8.

Afterwards, her eyes went wide when she raised both or her arms out to her sides and took them all the way up.  Then she started raising them straight up and down.  And then her eyes went wide again when she started doing breast stroke swimming motions.