Unraveling Myofascial Release with Dr. Starr and Megan Miracle: Healing Beyond Traditional Therapy

This month, the Business Inspires podcast explores innovative healing techniques with Katie Ellis and Brett Johnson, joined by special guests Dr. Charles Starr and Megan Miracle from Starr MFRPT & Wellness.

In This Inspiring Episode:

• Dr. Charles Starr shares his journey from acting school and yoga teaching to becoming an advocate for myofascial release therapy. Learn how his pursuit for answers has transformed pain management for his patients (02:25).
• You'll learn more about what makes myofascial release different from traditional physical therapy and massage, and how focusing on the body’s connective tissue system yields powerful results (09:19).
• Megan Miracle explains her personal connection to the practice, having found Dr. Starr as a patient after major surgery. She now brings her expertise in vibrational sound therapy to the team and describes how sound and movement support fascial health (24:39).
• Discover how combining yoga, vibrational sound therapy, and myofascial release creates a holistic, layered approach to healing for all ages and abilities (27:00).
• The team explains the importance of building a trusting patient-practitioner relationship, and why age or chronic pain doesn’t have to limit anyone’s potential for healing (28:13).
• Hear powerful stories of patient breakthroughs and how addressing both physical and emotional aspects of pain creates lasting transformation (46:05).

Want to learn more or connect with the Starr MFRPT & Wellness team?

Visit www.starrmfr.com, call 614-594-2400, or find them on social media.

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This season is presented by:

1. Grandview Heights

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Welcome to Business Inspires, where our goal is to inspire you to create the business you envision. I'm Brett Johnson, Tri Village Chamber Partnership board member and the owner of Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants. Thank you for following and subscribing to the podcast. With me is Katie Ellis, president and CEO of the Tri Village Chamber Partnership and co host of the podcast. As always, it's great to be here with you, Katie.

Great to be here with you, Brett. And today we have the wonderful opportunity to learn about Star Starr MFRPT and wellness, a big tri village chamber. Welcome to Dr. Charles Starr and Megan Maracle. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

Yes, thank you.

Good, good. And just a little bit of background for our listeners. Dr. Charles Starr's Journey to Myofascial release was anything but a straight path from acting school in New York to yoga teaching in Columbus to earning his doctorate of physical therapy from Ohi. After opening his clinic in 2019, it was the patients whose pain defied their scans that pushed him further. One John F. Barnes, myofascial release seminar later, everything clicked. And today, Dr.

Starr helps patients achieve breakthroughs that are transformative. Joining Dr. Starr is Megan Miracle. She's the vibrational sound therapy practitioner and director of marketing. Megan graduated college with a bachelor of music, a music industry degree and a marketing minor. She's been a musician all her life and has even written music for local indie short films and movies. Megan found Dr. Starr as a patient herself in 2024 after having major facial surgery that replaced her left jaw joint.

Not long after Dr. Starr offered her position to join his team. A great way for the two of you to get connected, but I'm so sorry that you had to go through that, Megan.

Thanks.

That sounds like quite the undertaking and quite the time of recovery.

Certainly was and still is.

Still is. And so to have for our ourselves and our listeners to understand a little bit more about the myofascial release, the first couple of questions are for you, Dr. Starr. What led you to specialize in myofascial release therapy here in Columbus?

Well, I, you know, I, as any therapist, physical therapist, goes to a, you know, an accredited program, you know, you learn a basic physical therapy and you know, your assessments and all that sort of thing and then interventions. And what's interesting is that I got a great education at Ohio State, is one of the top programs in the country, still is. And as much as they great information I got from them and it was a good foundational knowledge as I applied all the Interventions and diagnoses and trying to figure out what was going on with patients. I found that patients were feeling better with traditional therapy, and they might be in less pain and more functional. But the nagging question to me was, why are they still in pain? What are we not looking at and what are we missing? And actually, both. We're missing out on the aspect that the. The body is not just biochemical, which we're very much kind of ingrained in our, our society. You know, and you see all the pharmaceutical ads on TV and, and, and that's fine.

They have their place, but sometimes those don't work. And so I, you know, as I was. As I was kind of looking at or talking to a patient one day, I kept getting these in these brochures from John F. Barnes myofas release. And I had gotten them for a few years and just dismissed them, didn't really look at them. And, and I got one the other day, that one, one day. And I was thinking along those lines of we've got to help people in a different way. We got to start thinking outside the box.

We got to start thinking alternatively. And I always thought of the body as a bioelectromagnetic structure being. Or whatever, you know, that. Why aren't we treating that? You know, they're treating it in, like a wound care. They're treating it in various things, you know, and the fact that we're just electricity, you know, we got nerves running through us, and they're controlling our muscle tone, they're controlling our emotions, they're controlling what we sense in the world. Why are we not treating that? Especially when pain is all about receiving information that something is not quite right. We learned a lot about neurophysiology at Ohio State, which was great. But what was really interesting is that they told us we had a class on pain.

And basically they said pain is an emotional response to a noxious stimulus. An emotional response to a noxious stimulus. But we never talked about the emotional part. That's one of the things that's missing with, with the care for these patients who are in chronic pain. And sometimes they won't admit that there is an emotional aspect because they've dissociated so much from it. So that's probably a topic on down the road here. But let me tell you, let me answer your question first. So as I was talking to this patient, she had fibromyalgia.

And it just kind of put it together, I was thinking, okay, fiber fibromyalgia means muscle pain. And Then I saw the word on the brochure. The John F. Barnes brochure said piezoelectricity. I'm like, that's what I'm after, electricity. I want to see how do we treat the electrical system in the body. And, and so I looked at the, I looked at the brochure a little more, a little deeper, and I like, I gotta take this class. I gotta take this class.

So I went to the first seminar. I signed up. It was like two weeks later. I was down in Clearwater, Florida in January 2020, and I took this class. And within 15 minutes, John F. Barnes is talking about the myofascial system. He's talking about the fossil system, which is a connective tissue system throughout the entire body that runs head to toe, three dimensional. It is a web of elastin and collagen that runs throughout the entire body and it connects every cell.

It is the extracellular matrix. So it's all that stuff that the cells are in and it helps move the cells. It's a gliding system. And I talk even more about that later. But Anyway, my first 15 minutes in that class, I just connected with the, with what he was saying. I connected with what he was talking about as far as how we need, how we treat this and what we're supposed to do. Because I'd felt it already in my own body, in my own yoga treatment sessions. So, you know, I was going through, you know, everybody goes through emotions and trauma and all that stuff in their lives and sometimes you have those times when you need something a little bit more.

And, and so yoga kind of got me through some of those times. And what I found was I was holding poses for extended periods of time. And that's what John was talking about. He was talking about holding these hand positions or the hands on work for extended periods of time. And I thought, this just makes sense because I felt all this in my body. I felt the changes. I've seen the changes. And so after that first seminar, I started trying it on patients and I just, it just worked.

And I'm like, okay, this isn't just me. It's not just me feeling it because I'm in tune with it. It's actually helping people who have never heard anything about this and don't know what's going on. And I mean, literally my very first patient, that first day back from that seminar, I was using these techniques and I was gradually putting them into more and more and just pushing away from traditional physical therapy because that wasn't what the patient needed. And so I really felt like I was onto something. So I continued to take more classes and totally change my business and even change the name. And so anyway, hopefully that answers your question, but I. I've been in Columbus for a long time.

I've lived on in New York. I've lived in Los Angeles twice. I've been around. But, you know, we have family back here. So that's why I wanted to settle in Columbus and then started the practice in Grove City and moved it to Grandview last. Last fall.

Yeah, I love those aha moments. It's just. It's just this is why I'm here, you know. That's right there. Yeah. So talk about what. What exactly is myofascial release and how is it different from massage or traditional physical therapy?

So with myofascial release, we're actually treating the connective tissue. And so the connective tissue is made of these fibers, elastin and collagen. And there's some others, reticulin and those sorts of things. But the elastin and collagen are the main components. And then within those, within the extracellular matrix. You know, when I say extracellular, I'm talking outside each cell. So these are the fibers that hold the cells together. And the cells themselves have like a mini myofossil system.

They have a cytoskeleton that helps keep their shape. And so the. The fossil system also has a liquid in it called the ground substance. And this is made of hyaluronic acid and water. If. And hyaluronic acid is basically the same thing you have in your. In your joints. It's a synovial fluid type thing, but there's structured water in there too.

And what happens is when the fossil system gets really, really tight, meaning that the. There is less space between the fibers and they can't glide on each other, which is. It's a glide system. So when you see really, you know, babies and they're just so mobile and they can. So flexible, and then you see people who are stiff, those are good contrast, because when you see that stiffness or that lack of mobility, it's. Because there's a. It's. It's a tightening of the, of the collagen and elastin around each other, so they can't glide.

And that. That ground substance, that liquid that they're. They're bathed in, it becomes a viscous, it becomes thicker. And when it becomes thicker, then it's harder for that system to glide. It's like dragging something through a Mud puddle, as opposed to a glide, you know, Clear Lake. And so those. Those fibers can't glide. So then what happens is people then stop, start adapting to that movement, meaning they give in to the restriction and just say, well, I'll find another way.

So what makes this different is that massage can be. Feel really good and became great, especially if you get a really fantastic practitioner. But sometimes it can be too aggressive. And when you get aggressive with something like, you know, I've heard people say, oh, we gotta blast that fascia, or we're gonna just, you know, grind these knots out, you know, and that sort of thing. When you do that, what happens is it sets up a bracing pattern. Patients go, oh, this is. This is gonna hurt. I know, but I know it's gonna be for the better, but it's not always for the better because of these bracing patterns set up and they start to get tight when they're trying to get loose.

And so it has no, no desired effect. And so I even have massage therapists who come to me to get things worked out, to get pain and to really get pain relief because the massage isn't working for them. And I've had chiropractors send patients to me because their patients were too stiff to get, you know, for them to manipulate traditional therapy, physical therapy sometimes will just. I love traditional. I love therapy. I love my profession. But sometimes I feel like it's. It's too narrow, focused as far as if it's weak and it, you know, or if it's painful, it means it's weak.

That's not the case. It's not always the case because pain will weaken a muscle. It'll. It'll inhibit muscle performance. It's the way, if the body's way of protecting it says, oh, I'm not going to move that joint because this hurts. You pulled a hamstring. We're not going to move your knee. We're not going to let that knee move.

We're going to stiffen up until we get a chance to heal. And. And then people sometimes just ignore that. And then they get stiffer and stiffer and less functional and less mobile. And then we get. And then it just complicates the problem, Then it manifests somewhere else, then it becomes something else. And then they. Sometimes that's when they eventually get the traditional therapy and the therapist says, well, okay, you got a diagnosis of right shoulder pain because they've misused their shoulder because something was off in their back or their hip or whatever.

And now it's manifested in their shoulder. Because this is a system that you think of it when the myofascial system is working and it works as a glide system and think of it as almost like a spider web. And if you tug on a spider web, the whole web moves. With our fossil system, if there's a restriction in one area, it starts to cause a restriction somewhere else because somewhere else has to compensate for that movement. And our body has this way of adapting because we're trying to maintain homeostasis, homeostasis, just finding that equilibrium in our. All of our functions. And so what happens is when we get the homeostasis disrupted, then we create what we call an allostasis, which is an altered or other homeostasis. So this is the way that person functions, this is the way that person walks, this is the way that person picks up things.

This is the way that person's posture is. And that just continues to contribute to the problem again and again and it starts showing up somewhere else. So we're treating to probably answer your next question or continue with this one. Sorry, I got these long winded questions or answers. This is answering. But what happens is when I look at a patient, traditional physical therapy will say, well, I'm only supposed to treat your shoulder because that's what the diagnosis is. And it's like, well, that may not be where the problem is. And it might be their posture, it might be there's something going on in their foot.

It might be. So as a practitioner, what I do is I look at the patient holistically, I look at everything. And we start off with looking at the pelvis, because if the pelvis is off balance, everything else off. But traditional therapy doesn't. Isn't always allowed to do that because of these diagnosis codes. And we got to follow what the doc said or what the insurance company says. And they go, well, we're not going to pay you for treating it. You know, his person's foot, Even though that might be a problem, we're not going to treat that.

Because you were supposed to treat the shoulder. Well, that is the shoulder. So if that takes care of the problem, then. When I was in PT school, my anatomy class, I. My anatomy teacher said to me, or said to us one day, he said he was working with a patient with TMJ disorder and he was doing the traditional things, you know, certain exercises, strengthening, stretching. And he said, and things just weren't getting any better. So he stepped back, literally stepped back and said, let's look at you again and see what's Going on. He saw that the patient had a pronated foot kind of collapsed in architecture, and they got foot orthoses.

Not that this is always the answer. They got foot orthoses for the patient, and the TMJ disorder went away. And so he treated her foot to be. To take care of her jaw. And I think that's the kind of therapist I want to be. It's not easy. And that's the problem sometimes with healthcare, is that we don't have enough time with these patients to figure these things out. But that's why we do things one on one here, because, one, we create a very quiet, you know, environment for patients to heal and to ramp down their Paris or their sympathetic nervous system.

And we'll get to that in a second. So I'm, I'm. You guys don't have to ask any questions.

It's fascinating. And I had always had it described different like, that the myofascial system was like the white part of the orange, like if you peel it. But that is not at all what you're describing because of how it moves.

Yeah, that's. And that's the thing not to cut you. I'm sorry, did you want to say more?

I'm talking. No.

So that's the thing. So we can look at it and say. Yeah, you know, when you get a. Some baby back ribs or something and you peel off that silver lining. Yes, that's fascia. Okay. But that's dead fascia. That's not seeing it in a living organism.

Same thing with the orange. That is fascia in the orange. And that's a great description. In fact, we. We talk about it that way. But we have to realize that when we're talking about a human being, we're not talking about a static structure. We're talking about dynamic structure. We're talking about dynamic being somebody who moves, somebody who, you know, something that has to get through this world in some way.

An orange sits on a tree, right. And then it sits in your hand, then you eat it. But simple. Right. But we're not that way. We're moving around our world. Oranges don't move around our world. But.

But anyway. But yeah, you. That was a good description. But we have to see that separation, the difference.

Yeah, I love that. I love knowing that.

It's.

That's fascinating. Can you share what makes the John F. Barnes approach different from other bodywork or manual therapy approaches that are out there?

Yeah. So one thing is really emphasized other than the holistic approach. And just looking at the whole person is also the fact that elastin takes about 90 to 120 seconds for it to start to change and start to move. You know, when we're. When I've got my hands on a patient. So when I have my hands on a patient, I will have my hands in the same spot for an extended period of time. Because I know that 90 to 120 seconds gets that elastin to move. And that's the first release or softening that somebody might feel.

Sometimes it feels like pulling taffy. Sometimes there's heat that's released, which is, you know, that is a component of any stretching or any elongation that goes on in the body. And, and sometimes people feel like there's, there's pain, but we can get to that in a second. And. But we're releasing pain, not causing it, because it's such a gentle technique. And that's the other thing. It's non aggressive. So I'm just, I'm just putting my hands on them to the point where I feel some resistance in the tissue in the muscle or the skin or wherever and just waiting and waiting for that fascia, the connective tissue, to just communicate what it wants to do and where it wants to go.

And so it'll soften that first bit. 90, 120 seconds, elastin another three to five minutes. About three to five minutes. Collagen, which is the structural component of the, of the fibrous network that it starts to release, it starts to let go. And so the importance of collagen is that it is our structure. It was. Makes us who we are. People think it was all, we're bones, we're muscle and all that stuff.

Well, fossa is around everything. Remember I said it was an extracellular matrix. It's around every cell. That means a muscle cell, nerve cell, bone cell, everything. It's around everything. John F. Barnes talks about being fascia is everything. Everything's fascia.

Bones mineralize fascia. He even said one time in a seminar, and I'm like, what, what's he talking about? He said there are no muscles in the body. It's all. It's contractile fascia. And there's out there that there is just one big continuous muscle. It just looks different in different parts of the body. But it's all works together because one thing does affect another. So.

So I mean, even if you. I mean, just very simple. If you, if you try to do like a bicep curl and you're standing, you still have to contract muscles in your feet and your legs in order for that curl to be effective. So why isn't it all. It is all connected. You know, it's a system. It's all connected. And when people say, well, we differentiate the fascia from the, the, the muscle system or skeletal muscle system, or from the organs or.

No, no, no, no, it's all connected. It's all connected because we're not trying to separate. We're just saying this is how we're getting into some of those other areas. So the big difference with John F. Barnes is he, as opposed to massage therapy or some of these other techniques, is that we're holding those positions for at least three to five minutes because we're trying to effectuate change in that collagen. And we start to change that collagen, meaning it starts to elongate, it starts to get back, you know, unravel if you want, if you will, and it starts to elongate. Then it starts, that ground substance starts to flow into those spaces in between, and it becomes more of a fluid structure. And so we need that three to five minutes.

And that's the problem. A lot of times people are not holding it long enough in order to get that change, and then they just rebound back to where. Recoil back to where they were. So we have to change the collagen because the collagen is. What if I took a. If I took a solution and I, and I, and I dissolved everything except the collagen in a person, I would still recognize, like Megan. Still, I could still see that's Megan Miracle sitting next to me, you know, and if I dissolved all the collagen, then she'd just be a mess on the floor. So it's that, it's that important.

It's that structural component. And you can see. I don't know if this is gonna be on YouTube or not, but you can see, if we saw before and after pictures of Megan, she can attest that her face did change with what we were doing. And we're, and we even treat the bones. So it's a really fascinating work, but it takes a lot of patience too.

And what's about the bone aspect is it's actually a lot more common mainstream wise, than people know. So, for instance, if you know the concept of braces, it's a whole bunch of pressure on the teeth to force them to move. And all it takes is some time. So enough pressure that's constant for enough time can move the bone structure. That's the easiest way. That's Most well known that I like to explain to people.

Yeah, because we're moving teeth, which, you know, basically light bones in a bone. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is the stuff that I think is being missed so much, this type of work in, in healthcare today. And some of it is just that people don't have time to do it. But. But we do because we make sure that the patients are getting one on one treatment.

Every single patient. Yeah. So.

Yeah. Well, you know, since we've gotten Megan to now answer some questions, I want to go directly to ask Megan a question. I mean, the, the. Your clinic also offers yoga and vibrational sound therapy. Definitely want to touch upon that. I mean, do those modalities work together with myofascial release? I mean, is it a layered approach? How does that, how do you work together with that?

That's a great question. They do all go together. And what's interesting is, is the heartbeat of the practice is myofascial release. So everything that we do is based off of the principles of the John F. Barnes knowledge on the fascial system. And so we incorporated yoga because that was originally what led him to doing physical therapy and what led him into doing myofascial release using the John F. Barnes technique. So yoga is basically the mobilization of fascia.

So what we like to do is we like to recommend to our patients, hey, if you have this treatment done, in order to keep the fascia mobile and flexible, we need to continue to mobilize it and we need to break the pain cycle by using your body in the ways that maybe it hasn't in a while because we're trying to break the bracing patterns or we're trying to learn how to use our fascia in ways that were being prevented before. So that's a big part of our yoga, is that it's not just the traditional yoga in a sense. Like, yes, we do practice the poses and we do practice, like mindfulness and we do meditate, but we're also experimenting and playing in learning about our own each individual fascial systems. Because one person might have a restriction in their shoulders, while another one might in their jaw over here. So someone moves their head to the left just a little bit, they might feel a very big tension that another person might just be like, wow, I could just keep going on forever. And so that's like, one of the things we teach in our yoga practice too is when you're doing it with us, we're teaching you how to correctly mobilize the fascia. And how to almost self diagnose where those tensions are. So you can use yoga as the means to treat your fascia by yourself, even if you're doing it at home, not in our studio.

That is the goal of our yoga class. And not only that, but it helps reinforce all of the work that either him or I have done for treating fascial tension in our one on one sessions.

That's so cool. Because yoga is so age blind.

Yes.

You know, any age continuous. I mean, it's not like you're saying, well, to. To fix this, you're gonna have to run marathons. You know, after all, you can't do that. You know, yoga you can do pretty much forever. Honestly. That's. That's fantastic.

Yeah, yeah, we have chair yoga. We're doing mommy and me yoga soon. Like, we're really excited.

Yeah.

Because it's true, it's blind. And something that Charles says all the time, regardless of who the patient is, is that age will not be your limitation for what we're doing here. So when you come in here and you're experiencing pain and you come to us to help manage your pain and to learn more about how to have a different relationship with it, the excuse will not be, you can't do it because of your age. Okay. But we know this about ourselves. Here's what our skills are right now. Here's where our goals are for what we want in the future. Okay.

We're going to do this. Here's your plan of care. Will you partner with us? Because every patient that we see, it's not what we're doing to you, it's what we're doing together. Because the connection and the relationship between the patient and the doctor or the patient and the practitioner is almost one of the most important parts. Because if they don't trust what we're doing and we're not providing the information to them that allows them to trust us, then they won't see progress.

Yeah.

I love that, that phrase you said, your relationship with that situation, that pain or whatever, that's what it is. We have to recognize, do you want to hate it or do you want to make friends with it and kind of go and push it away? I mean, it's a lot to that. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And I know from personal experience, I've been a juvenile rheumatoid arthritis patient since I was 5 years old, so my relationship with pain has been a long one already. And God willing, it's a long way to go. So I completely, 100% believe that pain is a relationship and you can change the way you interact with it. Yes, you can avoid it. And we actually have what we call a fear avoidance model that we teach to our patients or you can understand. Like, yes, I hesitate towards those things, but I'm going to extend a little bit of faith for myself. I'm going to extend just a little bit of confidence that I might have to fake to try and see if I can either strengthen or soften, lengthen any of those particular adjectives of what the goal is in order to change the pain cycle or the bracing pattern.

And the other thing too, on top of that is we teach people how, you know, strategies for that, you know, to help. And where the myofascial release work comes in, and this will lead into the vibrational therapy, too, is that, you know, when that. Those elastin and collagen, those, those fibers of the connective tissue system or the fossil system are bound up tight, not gliding the way they should, and we don't, and we're not as fluid as we should be in that area that you can. I mean, literally, I can feel what happens with the patient. Sometimes. I do feel that electricity, that piezoelectricity I talked about, which is. Piezo means pressure. Electricity is electrical.

We're actually changing electrical charge of what's going on in that tissue and then creates what we call mechanic transduction, where it starts to move. But what happens is as we start to release that pressure, which can be up to 2,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, pressure, when those fibers are bound up and that. That restriction is there, that's a lot. I mean, that's like an elephant sitting on you. And you compound that to wider and wider areas. And then patients, you know, are stiffer, more, you know, less mobile, less inclined to move. But as that pressure is released, now they can. They.

They can truly have a different relationship with pain because they're not feeling it as intensely. And so now they can start to play around with it, you know, say, well, okay, I can move a little bit more this way, and it doesn't hurt. It starts to change that whole pain cycle. It starts to change those neurons in the brain that are saying, this is going to hurt, this is going to hurt. And so that that loop, which is. It's already. It's in the research, all over the place, that loop of neurons connected to each other that continue to keep patients in that pain cycle starts to get broken, and they start to go in a different direction, and they start to realize they can break out of that loop and not have to be in that pain. So every cell is vibrating, and when it gets bound up with the connective tissue being stiff or tight, what happens is that vibration becomes lower, and it gets to a point where those cells are not functional.

They are not getting the nutrients in, the oxygen in they need, they. And they are not getting the waste products out. And so what we do with the. With the myofos release is that helps get there, but sometimes we can get there a little bit faster by introducing more vibration. I'll let Megan talk about what she does, but this is something that I felt my own body during a sound bath from a friend of mine. And Megan, being a musician, I said, megan, what do you think of the healing effects of music and frequency? And so that led us to a lot of convers, you know, a few conversations, and then. Then the decision that it'd be a great thing for her to become a vibrational sound therapist. I'll let her talk a little bit more on that and how it helps the work that we're doing here.

So to kind of start this off, we talk a lot about, like, myofascial restrictions or tension, But I kind of want to just list of, like, what that commonly could be referred to as. So like, that would be, like, knots in your back. So if you talk to a massage therapist, you might be like, I have a really big knot back there. Well, that could be a myofascial restriction. There's also scar tissue. So if you've had, like, an accident where you have a really big scrape and it leaves a scar or surgeries that some. One of my surgeons told me that it's controlled violence, essentially, to the body. So obviously it will leave a scar tissue.

The brain knows that it's for the better, but the body doesn't understand that necessarily. So when we're talking about adhesions and scar or tension, we're talking about scar tissue or really dehydrated tissue where just nothing can really move around. It's inflexible. And that's how the £200,000 of pressure come into play. And that's how we start getting limitations of our limbs or different access to our bodies. And how vibration and sound comes into this is that because we are beings that have energy within us, in order to move, you have to have energy, right? E equals MC squared. So to have energy, there needs to be movement, or there can't be movement without energy is what I'm saying. And so if you apply vibrations to Areas that are less restricted, and you're introducing vibrations.

Essentially. What I do with using sound is I like to call it tuning up the bodies. So your body in a healthy sense, like, imagine an ideal, perfect world where every single cell in your body is just super healthy. Well, it's vibrating, and it's moving constantly. Each of your cells, every single one of them, are vibrating all together. And they are able to remove waste the way they're supposed to. They're able to send messages throughout your system saying, like, yep, everything's good here. All right, we're gonna eat some bananas over here.

Okay. We're gonna go and play some sports over here. Okay. So. So we're able to all work together just right to do everything we want to do, whatever that may be. Well, everything is working together in tandem. But unfortunately, because we don't live in a perfect world, not everything will. And we are human.

So we might not be drinking as much water as we should be, or we might not be getting as much sleep as we should be, or we might not be moving enough to keep things limber, or we might be moving too much, and we're having over exertion of the same joints over and over again. And we do degrade over time, and things do slow down over time. But essentially what I do with the vibrational sound therapy is I reintroduce to slowed down vibration or slowed down cells that are vibrating at a slower frequency than normal, and I retune them back up so that way they can do their jobs that they're supposed to be doing. Again, for myofascial release, specifically, Dr. Starr and I will sometimes treat the same patient at the same time. So he'll be doing his myofascial release work, and I'll be using tuning forks to help get the vibrations going to wake up the body in that area, so to speak. A lot of the patients that I've worked with, with Dr. Starr, when they have a particular injury that has happened, or if they have had a surgery that has happened, they have made a bracing pattern that is like.

And this could be due to the recovery phase where, like, you're not supposed to move around as much. I have seen that. Well, like, we're not going to move that area. And so what it actually does subconsciously is it tells the patient that particular area of the body is no longer able to move. It is no longer able to be accessible. And so naturally, our bodies do a pruning process. And it says, okay, we're going to cut off all the Things that are no longer useful to us. And so some people will say that they don't necessarily use their limbs anymore or they don't particularly even think about it anymore.

And that's a problem because if you're not thinking about it, if you're not using it, well, you are officially disassociating from your body part or an area of your body. So your brain is naturally going to say, they don't need resources, we'll stop sending them. And so my job as a vibrational sound therapist is to basically send a message back to the brain and say, hey, no, we're still operating over here. We need resources. We're trying to get rid of the waste that has happened here, and we need some processing done here and we need some healing sent down here. And it's interesting because what I do, Dr. Star will feel in a different area of the patient's body too. So it was kind of like a little theory that we did where it's like, okay, let's see.

You know how crazy direct some of the fascial system can be. And I was treating a patient's foot the other day, and he was on the upper part of her thigh. And there was a direct correlation between what I was doing with her foot and what he was feeling in her thigh. Was there any other ones that you noticed?

We've had quite a few, especially doing the tuning forks and the, the myofascial release of the hands on work at the same time, I believe we had, we, we had one patient. One patient came in one day and she says, you know, her knees were really bothering her. And so I treated around her knees a little bit. And Megan treated the feet and then we kind of reversed positions. We could feel that in one part of her right knee, the sound was just stopping. It was just, you know, usually it'll reverberate for a while, but it was just stopping in this one spot. And so Megan continued to work with her on that. And then I think I came back up and did some more hands on work.

And she texted us a few hours later and said, well, you guys, what you guys did was amazing. She said it was like one of the first times we treated her like this. And she said I needed to climb up two flights of stairs and didn't think I could do it. She said, but I did it without any pain. And so, you know, these two practices complement each other. And it's sometimes what she notices with how the vibration is going through the body system, she can feel it In a different way than I can feel it with my hands. And so that informs me on where to treat next. Or sometimes I'll just say, we'll just continue to treat there.

I'm going to treat over here. And I've even felt that in other areas of the body. And that's the one thing about myofascial release is just because I'm treating in one area of the body doesn't mean that another area isn't being treated. I've had patients, it happens almost every day where a patient says, okay, I'm feeling this. You're working on my shoulder, but I'm feeling it in my right calf. And I'm on their left shoulder. And we call it the fascial voice. It's the, the connected, communicating.

And that's what it is. It's a communication system. And, and they are doing research right now on cancer. And in 2017, there's, there was an article that, you know, made mainstream media, and it was from a research group from NYU Grossman School of medicine. And they said, we found a new tissue, a new organ in the body is called interstitium. Well, John Barnes been talking about file the fossil system for 50 some years, you know, and, and other people have been talking about it. Well, they, and I looked at the article and said, you know, why, why are they so bold, you know, embracing them to just think that they can just name something and call it, you know, and it wasn't even that fancy of a name. It's just, you know, we talk about interstitial fluid, you know, in between the cells and.

Anyway, so I just, I, I read the article and I realized what they were doing is they're laying the foundational knowledge, the foundation for their further research in how cancer metastasizes. These are cancer researchers, and they found when they, when they put silver colloid and tattoo ink, different parts of the body, they found it in throughout the body in different areas. And they said, there's no way that it could have gone there in the hit and gone into those areas other than through the fossil system. It wasn't through the bloodstream. It was in these remote areas. And so then they said, this is a communication system. It almost verified, pretty much verified, what other people were talking about years ago, like Dr. James Ochman.

Anyway, so it's really pretty fascinating that research is coming along. But it is a communication system. So that's why we can feel things in different parts of the body at the same time, whether it's the patient feeling it or us feeling it working together. So. And there are times when I'm treating, you know, somebody's jaw and they feel it somewhere in their arm. It's just, it's just, it's just fascinating work. And somebody asked me one day, they said, how many, how many patterns are there? You know, fossil patterns are. That you have to treat.

I'm like, they're billions. So we don't need.

Don't start counting them now.

People have been trying to say, well, these fossil lines and, and things like that, and those things work for some people, you know, and that's fine. But I don't. I, I just have a hard time seeing the body that way. And as they talk about superficial fascia and deep fascia, and it's like, I, I just. I just. It's all connected, so maybe it's a little bit thicker and, or deeper into this in a body, but in the end, it's. It's all the same system, so it's all interconnected, so it's hard to say. It's, you know, superficial fascia or deep fascia.

Okay. It's on the skin. It's superficial, artificial. But the interesting thing, though, is when, when in a. When we're changing that vibration, we're changing the energy in the body. And when you start to change the energy in the body, you do change the relationship patients have with their pain or the. At least the potential, because they have to be willing to go there. And some people are so.

And I. This is where my heart breaks for them. Some people are so identified with their pain. To get out of it can be a little bit scary because it's going from a known to an unknown. And I had a patient one time, she came to me, she had two years older lady in her 80s. She had two years of hip pain. There was no diagnosis of arthritis. Emory, she's 85 years old.

But no arthritis to cause it. No. No muscle tears? No. There was nothing. They couldn't find anything on the MRI, CT scans, x rays, because 1, the fossil system doesn't show up on that, on those diagnostic images. So we get patients here who, people, doctors will say, hey, medications haven't worked. Surgery hasn't worked. You know, other things haven't worked.

We're not sure what's going on. We think it may be a myofascial problem. So can you take a look at the patient? You know, and we get a lot of really, really, really great results. So this patient, she started feeling relief instantly. Not everybody does because it takes time. And this has gone on for a long time. And so it's not something that's going to be done within. And so she.

Her eyes were darting. You know, during this session, I usually ask people to close their eyes. And I said, are you okay? And she said, yeah, I'm just perplexed. I said, I'll explain whatever you want to know. And she said, no, I just don't have any pain in my hip right now. And usually lying down causes pain. I said, well, let's see what you're like when you stand up at the end. So she stands up and she's like, oh, my gosh, I have no pain in my hip.

I said, great. I said, that shows potential. It may not last because we still have other work to do in other areas, but it is a connective tissue. It's connective tissue. It's all throughout. Another area might be affected. So she was seeing me for a few weeks, feeling better and better and better now starting to take longer car rides. April go out to restaurants and things like that.

And then she says to me one day, she said, charles, I don't think I want to continue. And I said, why is that? And she said, I keep having these emotions come up, and sometimes that happens because emotions are trapped in the body. And she said. I said, what's going on? She said, I keep thinking about my mother and how oppressive she was and how she restricted me so much. And she said, and that right now, that emotion hurts worse than the original hip pain. And I said to her, I said, well, I said, you can. You can stop, because that's patient prerogative. You know, patients always have a choice, and we always give them that choice within the session.

You know, they don't have to receive a treatment. They can tell me to stop a treatment doesn't matter. It's all up to them. But I said, you. I said, your body's going through a healing crisis right now. You're going through a lot of change. And this is. And I said.

And you said, it's like you're on a trip down to Florida, and you're driving down to Florida. And this is how I described it to her. You're driving down to Florida. You know, there's sun and beaches and fun down there and a great time. And then you're back in Ohio, and you know that, but you're halfway down to Nashville. You're down in Nashville and you're going, I don't know if I should go, because I know it's back here. And that's safe because. Safe only because, you know, it's.

It's known. No idea what is down the road in Florida. And I said, so you can get. You can continue to drive and go down to Florida and see what's there, because it looks like it's pretty good, but it's up to you. And so she said, okay. She said, I'm going to continue. And I said, and I will help you through this. I don't psychoanalyze.

What we're asking is when patients. Those things come up, we want patients to process them. It's called a somatic experiencing. I don't need to know what it is. We don't need to psychoanalyze it. A lot of times that pain is trapped in the body because it has been there for so long. Like a childhood, you know, oppression or whatever, or a past accident, you know, traffic accident or something. When patients dissociate.

I had one patient who completely dissociated from her pain and didn't feel anything until, like, after she was sure that her husband, who'd been the driver and that car hit on his side of the car when they got. She was more concerned about her husband than she was herself. So she completely dissociated from her pain and didn't feel any pain until midnight that night when she was sure that her husband was gonna be okay. And it still came up in the clinic, this is two years after her accident, that it came up in the clinic again. And then she started to feel the pain that wasn't felt before because her body. Just our body and mind separated.

Yeah.

And so when we bring those back together, because now they're, you know, they. Sometimes there's what we, you know, we call it a, you know, a state dependent position or where if you go into that position on the table, it might mimic what the position where that dissociation occurred. Now, I'm not talking out of left field because Peter Levine wrote a book called Waking the Tiger, and he talks about this very thing. And there's a book called the Body Keeps the Score. And he talks about how pharmaceuticals weren't helping PTSD soldiers. And it's because they were suffering from memories, okay. And dealing with those memories, dealing with those past experiences and resolving them was what was important in order to get them through their trauma. And.

And through the manifestations of that trauma, schizophrenia, depression, you know, suicide, suicidal ideation, that sort of thing. I'm not saying that everybody's like that, but we all have experienced some sort of trauma. In our lives. And. And it doesn't have to be a big accident. So it could be the breakup of, you know, you broke up with your high school, you know, boyfriend or girlfriend. You know, it's. That.

That's traumatic enough that's heartbreaking. You know, death of a family member or pet or whatever those things are. Those are trauma that. That are psychological, but manifest in the body because. And if people say, well, how's it manifest in the body? Well, body state, you know, if you kind of cower down kind of and get introverted, it does make you a little more depressed or, you know, less energized. You open up and. Which is like one of the things we do in the yoga class. You're opening up like in a.

In a cobra pose or something. It exposes you to the world and makes you more of an extrovert. And it opens up and sends that energy out. And so sometimes people get in these state dependent positions, and that's when the. That's when the body has the chance to change the nervous system. Because now we're taking it from that fight or flight response, resolving it. So then they can ramp down, you know, ramp down that and go into the parasympathetic nervous system. And so we promote that from the moment people walk in, because we have a beautiful lobby with a cloud ceiling and lights going through it and rock garden so they can start to access that parasympathetic nervous system.

So when they get on the table with me or with Megan, they're more. Their body's already ready to receive and start to slow down. So they're not in that fight or flight response that they've been in for so long that's been perpetuating their pain. So when they. And if they do have a somatic experience where they start to resolve that, we don't care what it is, that. That's not for us to know. And the more people psychoanalyze it, the more they live in that moment and again and. But when they finally experience that moment, that moment of trauma, I can resolve it.

Oh, my gosh, that is so liberating. That is. That's absolutely amazing. Authentic healing. And it doesn't happen with everybody. Some people still have the mindset of, I just take care of my physical pain. That's great. You know, some people do need that.

And so it changes. It changes with a lot of patients and. And I've got lots of stories. I'm sorry. Yeah. Probably got a list of questions.

Well, yeah, I was gonna say I need to. I need to scratch. Scoot out. I'm sorry, but, but if we wrap it up, this has been great. I'll let Katie finish up what she wants to finish up. But yeah, I gotta, I gotta. One o'. Clock.

Gotta get to. This has been fantastic. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

So how can listeners know more about you? How can they get in contact with you and. And reach out?

They can call me at 614-594-2400, extension 2. Or you could also look at our website. Ww.star with two Rs. M as in Mary. F as in Frank. R as in roger.com star MFR like myofascial release. We're also on Facebook. We also have Instagram, but we're also on TikTok.

Any of those places. You'll be able to see what we're doing, how we're helping people and if we can help you.

Yeah. And we also do talk with the doc at Stoffs every. What's first Tuesday of the month?

Yes, first Tuesday in Grant.

So super.

Yeah.

Thank you for having us and letting us do this.

Yes.

For hours, as you could probably tell.

No, no, it's great. Thank you, listeners. Thank you for joining us. And don't forget to check out our podcast page on the Tri Village Chamber website. Look for the podcast tab at the top of the homepage and tell us what you think about this or any of our other episodes at infohamberpartnership.org.