Do you have any friends who try to address their ailments through natural medicine? If they are taking a western approach they are likely taking a huge amount of supplements based on what our scientists have discovered about various herbs and minerals. If you know anyone who is exploring eastern medicine you may find that the approach seems to be more concise. This is because eastern medicine, be it Ayurvedic or Traditional Chinese Medicine, is based on methods of balancing the individual's systems and western natural medicine is bases on treating symptoms primarily, just like mainstream western medicine. The jumbled mess of pills, teas, and juices that we wind up using, desperately trying to find some natural way to find balance without any real knowledge of what that balance looks like, is a testament to just how under developed western naturopathy is compared with eastern systems in general.
It should come as no surprise that Eastern Medicine is more developed and sophisticated than western approaches. The civilizations that developed them were very old and literate. Such literacy over vast amounts of time allowed people to take an empirical approach and keep track of the results, not really scientific but empirical regardless. In the west we abandoned the development of natural medicine for a more scientific approach. As science tends to favor studying the parts rather than the whole, and trying to understand the whole is a more esoteric view, we come up with fragments of reality without a lot of understanding of how the fragments interrelate, and this is exactly how western natural medicine approaches the world.
In my many years as a massage therapist, I continued to study and go back to school to learn more about using massage therapeutically, but I could have done so for the rest of my life and never see the big picture, as we are trained to look for in Rolfing. No fragmented group of methods will give a person the big picture, because we must start developing methods with a big picture in mind. Rolfing is purely western approach to helping people align their posture and movement with gravity. This is done by addressing strain patterns and working with the innate intelligence of the body, just as eastern medicine works with balancing the body's systems so that health can be achieved and disease can be addressed. Rolfing has many methods, and some have been used for deep tissue massage and myofacial release, but the methods alone do not constitute Rolfing, only if they are used to build support in gravity, increase self awareness, and lead to a greater sense of self. This is the big picture we are looking for.
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