translated from French by Jennifer Neal; read in french 👉here👈
By talking about torsion or helix, we introduce a fundamental idea that goes against our learned habits. We always worked with a median plane which divided the body in two. A right side, a left side. A limb on one side, a limb on the other. A central sternum and ribs on each side. One eye on each side of the face’s central axis, etc. And we learn to work a sacroiliac joint in the same way on the right as on the left, a right temporal bone in the same way as a left temporal bone. We were surprised, however, that dysfunctions are found more frequently on one side, in particular the sacrum, but without drawing any conclusions.
Yet, there are many signs that tell us that the rule regarding an equivalent right/left is incorrect.
First of all, for the organs, this rule doesn’t work, the heart is on the left, the liver mainly on the right, the stomach mainly on the left… Even if we have a right lung and a left lung, they are not identical. The left and right kidney also have neither the same shape nor the same positioning in relation to the spine…
Secondly, any shoe maker will tell you that a shoe for a left foot is not made in the same way as a shoe for the right foot.
This asymmetry, in osteopathy, we have classified it as anecdotes, artefacts and do not know what to do with it.
However, its origin goes back a long way in the genesis of life and the universe.
Astrophysicists, in their theories, tell us that at the time of the big bang, supposedly the moment of creation of our universe, matter and antimatter were born in phenomenal quantities. Both of them happily annihilated each other, a particle of matter meeting a particle of antimatter and creating a magnificent firework display that only leaves energy behind. However, we are made of matter, so there was more matter than antimatter…
Particles that we believed unbreakable (electrons, protons) are in fact made of elementary particles, the quarks (charm, bottom, up, etc) and antiquarks (up and down). Recently, the latest observations show that in a proton for which the physicists thought they would find as many up antiquarks as down antiquarks, they actually found there were more down than up… dissymmetry again.
In the case of amino acids that compose the proteins of living organisms, it has been found that of the two possible forms of these molecules, left (L for laevorotatory, “which turns to the left”) and right (D for dextrorotatory, “which turns to the right”), which are mirror-symmetrical molecules, living organisms have chosen almost exclusively left-handed forms, the only ones capable of making the correct structures of proteins in space. These are also forms that interact with light by making it rotate left. The latest theories suggest that this orientation originated in space. The same is true with sugar-like molecules, which are all D-oriented.
Our body therefore manages well with these oriented forms but doesn’t know how to process the inverted sister molecules. This may well be one of the problems of overuse of additive molecules and flavour enhancers which are chemically synthetised molecules and therefore often have equal quantities of L- and D-forms. Glutamic acid, which we consume as glutamate, is one of the most used products for this purpose. Invert sugar is an industrially produced sugar that becomes laevorotary in its fructose-glucose mix instead of being dextrorotary like sucrose from which it is often derived. It is believed to be the cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemic… One does not play with natural asymmetry with impunity. Noticing here that this asymmetry is structural (shape of the molecules) but also functional (action on polarised light).
Then, when the body assembles the amino acid molecules (proteins), most of the time, it creates it in helixes, made possible by the L-amino acids alone. Proteins can also be put in “sheets”, but this is often pathological (Creutzfeldt-jakob’s disease), as the body no longer knows how to handle such a form, which it then takes as waste and accumulates.
When the body assembles sugars (DNA, starch), it makes helixes…
The helix is an asymmetrical structure in a median plane, it can go to the right or to the left. In the nomenclature that we use, most of those that compose living organisms are left-handed according to OUR nomenclature… (aah nomenclature... the joy that we’ll keep for later).
According to Vincent Fleury, regarding the embryonic development, cell division is asymmetrical: the two parts resulting from the cell’s division, are not equivalent in size and, from this, stems the orientation of the foetus (head/tail; back/belly): “the asymmetry of the final animal (…) stems from the asymmetry of the first cell divisions” (“Le tourbillon de la vie – une simple histoire de nos origines” Fayard 2017).
This dissymmetry can also be found at the scale of the cell and its environment: polarity on either side of the cell membrane induced by a molecular concentration gradient. One may wonder why this asymmetry persists to all levels of the universe and matter, then in life.
I am going to make a very simple hypothesis and that will be enough for us to work with: if there is symmetry, movement will eventually stop, and that is death. Dissymmetry allows the movement to maintain itself to go on to life. And, us, osteopaths, led by the work of Still, decree that life is movement.
We just need to adjust our concepts to integrate the inextricable dissymmetry on whatever level of life and matter into the foundations of our practice, forgetting the illusion of a right/left symmetry.
Source illustration : K61 - Dysplasie.. encore... *
