Structure Determines Function
Every test came back normal, so why do you still hurt? The answer is not in the numbers. It is in the structure of your body.
Part 2 · How the Body Works I — The Framework of the Human Body · Essay 11
You pick up your test results at the hospital. You have had blood tests, a CT scan, an ultrasound, even an endoscopy. The doctor flips through the pages and says, “There’s nothing particularly wrong.” Should you be relieved? Your lower back still aches, your neck is stiff, your head throbs, and your stomach feels bloated. At night you toss and turn. They say nothing is wrong, yet your body clearly hurts.
What you hear next is usually the same. It’s your nerves. It’s stress. It happens to everyone as they get older. So you walk out of the hospital with painkillers, digestive pills, and vitamins in hand. Then you go looking for another hospital, another specialist. Many people go from hospital to hospital as if they were out shopping.
Nothing Is Wrong, So Why Does It Hurt?
In my last essay, I said that our body is not a machine whose broken parts we swap out, but a living thing that heals itself. Then why does a body that heals itself keep hurting instead of getting better? What is blocking it from the inside? This essay is the Momsalim Movement’s answer to that question. The answer is one sentence: structure determines function.
When the shape of the body becomes twisted, the body can no longer do the work it is meant to do, and its function declines. To get the body doing its work again, you must set its shape — its twisted structure — right. Taking pills, getting injections, or eating health foods that are supposed to be good for you will not bring a twisted structure back into place. So if you are suffering from pain no one can explain, if every test says nothing is wrong and you still hurt, it is time to look at your own structure.
Through an Engineer’s Eyes
I spent my whole working life as a civil engineer. I built roads and bridges, tunnels and subways. In that world, “structure determines function” is common sense that needs no explanation. If a column leans even a little, doors no longer close properly, windows start to stick, and cracks appear in the walls. No engineer would just plane down a door because it won’t close, or put new wallpaper over a crack in the wall. Do that, and the door will stick again and the crack will open again. An engineer looks at the structure first. He checks whether the foundation has sunk, whether a column has bent, whether a beam has deformed. This is called a structural inspection.
Yet when it comes to the human body, we do the exact opposite. When our lower back hurts, we stick a pain-relief patch on it; when our head aches, we take a headache pill. It is like planing down the door and covering the crack with wallpaper. The body is a structure too — and the most finely crafted structure there is, refined over millions of years. When this structure becomes twisted, everything that works inside it is affected.
The Framework of the Body: Bones, Muscles, and Nerves
The Momsalim Movement calls bones, muscles, and nerves “the framework of our body.” Understanding clearly what each of these three does is half of learning about the body.
Bones are the frame of a building. They hold the body up and give it its shape. They protect the head with the skull, the internal organs with the ribs, and the reproductive and excretory organs with the pelvis. Muscles are the clothes the skeleton wears. They work with the bones to create movement, they protect the skeleton, and when a bone slips out of place, they can pull it back. Nerves are the communication network that carries information. Every cell in the body is connected by nerves, and through this network, the central nervous system — in the brain and inside the spine — receives reports on the state of the body and sends out instructions.
When these three work in harmony — when the skeleton is in place, the muscles are soft, and the nerves flow freely — every organ in the body does its job fully. This is what it means to be healthy and free of pain. I will cover bones, muscles, and nerves one by one, in detail, in the next three essays. Today, let us first look at how the three fit together and work as a chain.
How Does Pain Begin?
The formula the Momsalim Movement uses to understand the body is simple. When the skeleton twists, the muscles stiffen. When the muscles stiffen, they press on the nerves. When the nerves are pressed, we feel pain.
The muscles around a joint are made to fit that joint’s movement exactly. When the joint slips out of alignment, the muscles tense up on their own and pull tight to keep things from getting worse. When you sprain your ankle slightly, it heals after a few days of rest because, while you sleep, the muscles pull the misaligned joint back into place. Once the joint is back where it belongs, the muscles rest too and become soft again. So a joint slipping out of alignment does not mean you feel pain right away. As long as the misalignment stays within the range the body can handle on its own, the body takes care of it by itself.
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But if the misalignment grows little by little and the muscles have to keep pulling, over time they stiffen and harden. These stiff muscles then press on the nerves that run between them. That is when we feel pain. Feeling pain means the problem has gone beyond what the body can solve on its own, and the body has begun its urgent plea: please, do something about this.
That is why a muscle that hurts is always hard. A sore shoulder with shoulder muscles as soft as a baby’s skin simply does not exist. If your back hurts, your muscles have stiffened, and your muscles have stiffened because your back bones have twisted. Unless the pain comes from an accident, a fall, or a blow, all muscle pain comes from a twisted skeleton.
Pain is a signal the body sends to say that something has gone wrong. When something hurts, you can trace it back like this: the muscles have stiffened; they stiffened because the skeleton has twisted; this part has twisted, so it needs to be set right. Find the cause and remove it, and the signal turns off by itself. Reaching for a painkiller as soon as something hurts is like cutting the power to a traffic light because it is flashing red. The warning disappears, but the danger stays.
When Nerves Are Pressed, Organs Lose Their Way
That is not the end of it. When nerves are pressed, it is not just that pain appears; communication grows weak or unclear. Reports from all over the body do not reach the central nervous system properly, and its instructions do not reach every part of the body properly either. Then the organs that depend on those nerves can no longer do their job. The organs themselves are not broken. It is simply that the system of instructions and reports is not working properly.
Take gout as an example. Gout is known as a disease in which uric acid builds up in a joint and forms crystals, and those sharp crystals stab the joint and muscles, causing terrible pain. The Momsalim Movement sees it this way. The big toe joint slips out of alignment, the muscles around it stiffen, and the stiff muscles press on the nerves. Then the report that uric acid is building up never reaches the central nervous system. Without that report, the central nervous system cannot respond, and the uric acid keeps building up. The way out lies here as well. When the misaligned joint is set right, the muscles soften and the communication network opens again. Once it gets the report, the central nervous system gives the order to get rid of the uric acid, and the body flushes it out in the urine. The pain begins even before the uric acid, when the twisted toe makes the muscles, tendons, and ligaments around it stiffen. The uric acid only adds to the load. My complaint about modern medicine is that it has been slow to find out why uric acid, which is meant to leave the body in the urine, builds up in the body at all.
If you do not know this principle, you end up spending your whole life holding back from the foods you want, controlling your diet, suffering from flare-ups of pain now and then, and visiting the hospital regularly for more medicine. It is a life of managing the result while leaving the cause untouched. Just straighten the twisted big toe, and the gout goes away. Every person with gout has a twisted big toe.
Why Doesn’t It Show Up in Tests?
Now let us return to the question we began with. Your tests are normal, so why do you hurt? Tests usually look at the shape of the organs and the numbers in the blood. They check whether an organ has a lump, an injury, or inflammation, and whether the numbers fall outside the normal range. But how a slightly twisted hip joint affects the whole body, how hard the stiff muscles are pressing on the nerves, and which organs are not getting proper instructions because of it — these things do not show up well in numbers.
Since the organs are not yet damaged, the tests come back normal. But those organs are already failing to do their full job. Since no bone is broken, the CT scan is normal; the muscles have stiffened and the nerves are being pressed, but none of that appears on the report. And so the body hurts. The tests are not wrong, and you are not faking it. They are simply looking in a different place. Eyes that look only at the parts cannot see a problem with the structure. “Nothing is wrong” means nothing is wrong with the parts. It does not mean nothing is wrong with your body.
Posture Is the Body’s Own Diagnosis
Problems with the structure may not show up in the numbers, but they can be seen with the eyes. That is what posture is. If an upright lower back and an open chest are the signs of a healthy body, then bad posture means the skeleton has already twisted. Depending on which part of the body has twisted and how far, posture takes a different shape in each person. Look closely at that posture, and you can read which parts of the body are being affected and which organs are failing to do their full work. Posture is a diagnosis the body writes about itself.
Unless there has been a particular accident or injury, the starting point of this chain is usually the hip joint. The hip joint is the key structural link between the upper and lower body. It carries more weight and movement than any other part of the body, and at the same time it is the weak link that slips out of place most easily. I will explain later, in detail, why the hip joint evolved to be such an easily misaligned weak link. When the hip joint slips out of alignment, the pelvis tilts, the sacrum moves out of place, and the lower back, upper back, and neck above it twist one after another. When the back rounds and the shoulders roll forward, the space in the chest and abdomen narrows, and the organs inside are pressed. It is no exaggeration to say that more than 90 percent of the illnesses people suffer begin with a misaligned hip joint.
Restore the Structure, and Function Returns
The good news is that this principle works in reverse too. When the bones settle back into place, the muscles that had been tensed up holding on to them become soft. When the muscles soften, the nerves that were being pressed are released and carry their signals clearly again. When the nerves come back to life, the organs that depend on them regain their function. When the structure becomes stable again, so does function.
This is no grand miracle. It is the body’s natural response to small efforts — straightening your lower back and opening your chest, trying on your own to set your twisted skeleton right — that build up day by day. That is why only you can do it. No doctor, no medicine, not even I can do it for you. Just as an engineer sets a building’s column straight, you set your own body’s column straight yourself.
In my next essay, I will talk about the first part of this structure: the skeleton. The skeleton is the frame of our body. And when that frame twists, what happens to the body?
Your body can heal itself — learn how.
Related essays: #3 “The Cockroach Theory”, #10 “Your Body Is Not a Machine”
