Have you heard about a virus going around that effects the blood, organs, and causes heart inflammation? Have you heard the terms myocarditis or pericarditis? These terms can stir concern, so let’s take a look at your contents and containers as it relates to fascia and heart inflammation! 

Heart Inflammation

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle tissue and pericarditis inflammation of the fascia around the heart. Undoubtedly, this inflammation is becoming more common. If this happens to you, and after you have exhausted the arsenal of meds, have you truly healed?  Or have you just put a band-aid on your most important organ? Meds surely have an important role in treatment, yet they do nothing for the structure of the organ.

A key tenant of our treatment at Pierce Family Wellness is that structure and function are interrelated. Understanding this connection is important to improve longevity. Lets deep dive into that concept as it applies to your heart.

First, your heart is a double pump moving oxygen depleted blood from the body into the lungs, and from the lungs back to the heart, and then delivers that oxygenated blood to the rest of the body.

Secondly, this pump is encased in a fascia called the pericardium. The pericardium attaches to the front of your 6th and 7th neck vertebrae, the 1st trunk vertebrae, to the back part of your chest bone, and below into both sides of the top of your diaphragm.

Fascia and heart inflammation treatment

Now that you have a basic layout of the heart and its fascia, let’s talk about how to treat inflammation of it. If we break it down into contents and containers, the heart would be the contents and the containers would be the fascia that surrounds the heart, layer by layer, up to the skin.  

Therefore, if you want to help remove inflammation from an organ, you have to ask one big question…..Where is the inflammation going to go? You must create space for the inflammation to leave the heart. This happens by working from outermost layer to deepest. 

Consider the image above. Treatment begins with the skin/fat (skin rolling and cupping). Next, we treat the muscle layers with segmental exercises and stretching for all of the “container muscles” of the heart (diaphragm, sternalis, pecs, intercostal, ect.).  Then, we use ELDOA and joint pumping to treat the bones and the deep fascial layers. Specifically, we would pump and use ELDOA for the chest bone, lower neck, and ligaments of the diaphragm. 

Finally, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe to treat the human body. Moreover, we must employ a method that respects the different layers of the body to give inflammation a place to disperse. This will pay major dividends for your vitality and longevity.