One large gorilla sitting in the middle of the manual therapy room is reflexes. Not nerve reflexes, like the stretch reflex the neurologist hammers your knees for; these reflex arcs to and from the spinal cord are simple enough to understand. But there are much wider and more diffuse networks of reflex correspondences, such as those mapped out by foot reflexology. We have no idea how they work, but we are pressing on them all the time. This article explores, but in no way resolves, this opportunity/ problem.

We have a modern-day parallel, but it does not amount to an explanation: a holograph. A holograph is recorded on a photographic plate, but it is not a photograph in the conventional sense. It is a record of interference patterns, like the spreading and endlessly intersecting waves of a bunch of pebbles thrown into a quiet lake. The patterns of interference are created by a reference beam of coherent light interacting with the light bounced off an object. Shine a coherent light through the holograph and a three-dimensional image of the object is produced – a hologram.

The interference patterns on the holograph are repeated many times across the plate. Thus, you can divide the plate into pieces, shine the laser light through any of the smaller pieces, and the entire object will still appear. Depending on the holographic process, the hologram produced from the partial piece of holograph will be smaller or less detailed (remember that, there’ll be a quiz) than one produced by using the whole plate. But the whole image is essentially stored within each repetitive iteration of the interference pattern.

The body seems to be doing something similar, in that certain areas of the body seem to contain a microcosm of the whole body, or an image of the body structures, which we will term an ‘imago’ for the purposes of this article.

Take the ‘imago’ on the foot. Foot reflexologists claim they can treat the whole body via the reflexes on the foot. When I was learning, the story ran something like: “There are 70,000 nerve endings in the feet, and these nerves have connections to all the organs.” The trouble with this statement is that it simply is not true. There may be that many nerves in the feet, but there is not (so far) any traceable direct neural connection between these sensory endings and the organs of the trunk.

The map of foot reflexology, originally called ‘zone therapy’, has the medial part of the foot corresponding to the medial part of the body, and lateral to lateral. The toes generally correspond to the head, the metatarsal area to the chest, and the heel area to the pelvis. In other words, with some allowable distortions, the body is mapped on the soles of both feet as i f in looking at the person, we look at the soles as if the person sat with their legs out, heels on the floor.

Ida Rolf used to surmise in my classes with her that the reflexes in the feet were ‘the end points of fascial planes.’ I am a tireless promoter of both fascia and Rolf, but Ida, bless her, was also a little out of hand here. Aside from the fact that the fascial planes don’t have endpoints, it is equally difficult to find any credible fascial connections between these points and the organs in question. Generally, the fascial structures on the medial and lateral side of the foot do connect with the medial and lateral aspects of the body, but the front of the body connects with the top of the foot, not the sole. And the fascial plane of the foot’s sole – the plantar fascia and surrounding tissues – connects fascially only up the back of the body, but it makes no anatomical sense to connect the heel part of the plantar fascia with the lower part of the body and the toeish part of the plantar fascia with the upper body. And the why of the connections to the organs remains obscure.

How about the acupuncture meridians, are they how the reflexes are connected? Several meridians, with the names of organs, end in the feet, but they do not present the same map as the reflexology chart, and other organ meridians do not go near the feet at all.
<p>
<img src=’https://novo.pedroprado.com.br/imgs/2006/802-1.jpg’>
<p>
But I hope I am not alone in this readership in finding this map on the foot to be fairly accurate and credible, despite the difficulty in explaining it. In 1974, when I entered this profession, I tended to pooh-pooh it all, but soon found that those women with IUDs (a then-popular method of birth control) always had reflex soreness on the uterine points in the heel. And I never met an alcoholic or even former alcoholic who could not be raised to the ceiling by precise, but not brutal, pressure on the pituitary point in the center of the big toe pad. And on and on, time after time, this map was and is an excellent form of diagnosis – those with whiplash had touchy reflexes at the base of the big toe, those with irritable bowel syndrome howled when the intestinal points were palpated, etc., etc. (I cannot vouch for its efficacy as a treatment mode, though it remains in wide current use, which usually indicates some measure of success.)

What is absolutely beyond question for me is the idea of imago- the idea that there are microcosmic images of the whole body housed in certain of its parts. There is no doubt that there are images of the body within the nervous system – the sensory and motor homunculus in the parietal lobe of the brain, and the maps of the body in movement in the cerebellum and basal ganglia.

The foot is by no means the only odd imago in the body, far from it – the actual originator of ‘zone therapy’ started with the similar map in the hand.

Modern practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine have a chart in which the ear is acupunctured according to a map where the lobe is the head and the body is mapped as an upside-down fetus on the ear. Remember those staples or small pins in the ear that were an appetite-suppressing fad for a while? Those devices were designed to stimulate the stomach points in the ear. And the tradition of sailors wearing an earring came from ships visiting Hong Kong and Shanghai, and these auricular acupuncturists putting an earring precisely into the eye point on the ear lobe, to give the sailor a sharper eye in the crow’s nest.

Besides the ear, the iridologists will assure you that the iris of the eye is an accurate and revealing map of the body. The face is also a microcosm for the whole body, and is read that way in Aryuvedic and Oriental diagnosis. The tongue and the lips are also maps for the whole body. There are even maps of reflexes for the whole body on the genital organs, though practicing that form of reflexology in this country might get a little dicey. Perhaps if you knew enough about the little fingernail (or anywhere else), it would show you the whole body in reflex form.
<p>
<img src=’https://novo.pedroprado.com.br/imgs/2006/802-2.jpg’>
<p>
While these seemingly miraculous correspondences are stubbornly hard to explain, we should also remember that allopathic medicine uses a number of reflexes for which the mechanisms are likewise unknown. It is common knowledge that people experiencing a heart attack can get pain across the surface muscles of the chest and down the arm. Why this happens, no one knows. Odd pains in the back, between the shoulder blades and the spine, can be correlated with trouble in the liver or gall bladder, but again no one knows why or how the message is carried. And what about these referral areas from myofascial trigger points – how do they work? These are widely used in contemporary massage therapy, but search the literature in vain for a convincing explanation of how and why they refer.

So the fact that the mechanism of reflexology is unexplainable by current science does not bother me a whole lot, or cause me to reject the notion, since so many other similar phenomena -like how aspirin works – are also still waiting for a convincing story as to how they work.

Being an embryology buff myself, I have wondered if these reflexes might perhaps speak to common embryological origins for the tissues involved. Though I am still delving through the pressure and growth fields of Blechschmidt to understand the biodynamic diasporae of cells that is our morphogenesis, it is still pure speculation and still begs the question of a mechanism for maintaining communication once the cells are separated.

Like the hologram, the idea of fractals does not create an explanation, but I like it anyway. In graphed equations like the famous Mandelbrot series, or the fractal of the author’s hand included here, the same shape recurs again and again at different levels of magnitude. Perhaps this is a general principle in the complex non-linear dynamics of our world, and the wonder is not that there are images and maps of the body hidden within its various parts, the wonder is that we have not made more use of them.
<p>
<img src=’https://novo.pedroprado.com.br/imgs/2006/802-1.jpg’>
<p>