For 2 years I’ve had a client coming every few months for some sort of discomfort or pain in her left leg, hip, knee or ankle. Sometimes she additionally has some pain in her L lower back. Every session we would make excellent progress and she would feel better for a while. And every time, the pain would creep back into the left side, often somewhere else. We were “chasing pain,” and even though we were doing a good job of it, I was unsatisfied.
My client has no particular eye complaints and when we did the usual oculomotor tests that I do, there were very few signs of an ocular motor dysfunction.
An ocular motor dysfunction creates difficulties in controlling and coordinating eye movements. These dysfunctions can create compensations in global movement patterns that lead to pain and tension in areas far from the eyes. They impact all kinds of daily activities and general brain functions, especially around focus and attention. Usually I can see that the eyes are not moving smoothly, that the client is avoiding looking in certain directions, or that the client has discomfort, strain or pain in the eyes. Despite not having these clinical signs, after years of not finding the solution to this persistent moving left side pain, I thought we should dig deeper into a possible ocular motor dysfunction.
We did a further set of ocular motor tests and found some tiny variations in stability when the right eye was closed and she was looking to the left. Palpation of the eye muscles reveals some pretty tight ones, especially the left rectus superior. I used Neurokinetic therapy protocols to help confirm my hypothesis on which muscle was causing the problem and started to do a myofascial release there. As I began to release the area I noticed a puck of very stiff tissue that felt like scar tissue. Surprising! I asked about accidents (a soccer ball to the face? a fall?), but my client couldn’t remember anything. These sort of adhesions didn’t happen without a physical trauma, but what could it be?
The first release yielded good results and my client was starting to feel reduced low back tension and neck tension. Her left hip muscles were starting to fire more efficiently too. After we did integration, I had her lay back down to do a second release in the same area. All of a sudden she said “OH!! you know when I did have a black eye!? When I was born.” My client had a forceps assisted birth and this was a birth injury! In our first sessions we had addressed some cranial issues stemming from that, but she had never mentioned the black eye before. Mystery solved. Further release of the scar tissue changed the way her left eye moved significantly and she went home with a bunch of eye movement exercises to do over the next month as she integrates the changes from the release. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the results on her next visit.
