Educational avenues for promoting dialog on fascia

Abstract

If your healthcare professional students have not heard about the importance of fascia they definitely should, and if your residents have not heard about the manifestations of fascia health they definitely will from their patients. While fascia may not be the sexiest of organ systems, it is one of the most influential. Fascia is gaining interest from researchers, physicians, and many subdivisions of manual medicine including massage therapists. The fascial system is now being recognized with roles in pathology, fluid movement, and proprioception. It is also important in skeletal muscle movement, perception of pain, protein regulation and expression, cell signaling, neoplastic growth, and hormone distribution in our body. It can be the reason why we feel chronic pain or why we feel tightness after physical activity. The primary responsibility of fascia is to connect systems so that the body works as a whole, which is what permits this topic to be easily embedded anywhere in our health curricula. Whether you teach students in schools of medical, veterinary, dental, physical therapy, physician assistant studies, or occupational therapy, fascia matters. Whether you teach in an integrated curriculum or a curriculum that is designed for problem-based learning or a classical discipline-based curriculum, connective tissue has a place in academia. So, in our cramped curriculum how do we make sure that our current undergraduate and graduate students understand the complexity of fascia without adding additional time to coursework? To answer this question, this article demonstrates how fascia can fit anywhere in the curriculum because it is found everywhere. Clin. Anat. 32:871-876, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: anatomy; connective; curriculum; fascia; tissue.