Bowen Therapy

I came upon Bowen Therapy by accident, not by design. Graduation, the culmination of my seven years training as a doctor of naturopathic medicine, required a minimum number of extra-curricular seminar hours. The Bowen introductory four-day course would give me enough seminar hours to satisfy the requirement for my final year. I took the training, not having any idea what it was about! I now think it was one of the best investments I have ever made.

I got very excited when, during the training, I got rid of my wife's neck pain by doing a 15 second treatment on my way out of the house one morning while she stood in the middle of the kitchen. Later, within a week of finishing the training, I improved by 90% a case of incontinence in a 72 year old lady. Although Bowen therapy is primarily a pain relief technique, it does so much more!

Well, what is Bowen therapy? It is a dynamic system of muscle and connective tissue therapy and it is revolutionizing health care all over the world. In the years following the Second World War, Mr. Tom Bowen developed the technique in his native Australia. The Bowen practitioner does a series of gentle muscle and connective tissue moves, a few at a time, with short waits between sets of moves.

These moves stimulate the body to rebalance (heal) itself. The relief can be immediate (some patients have left the treatment bed saying the pain is gone). Improvement may also continue over the next several days. For the classic Bowen move, the practitioner's finger and thumb tips find the muscle, pull only the skin to the side of the muscle and then with gentle pressure, push the muscle out of its resting position. This push is continued until the muscle pops, under the finger and thumb of the practitioner, into its original position. It is completely painless.

These incredibly simple moves are what your body will interpret as a stimulus to make curative changes.

Until the completion of current research to try to find out the mechanism by which Bowen works, we are only (intelligently) guessing. A conventional point of view will say that there is a muscle/tendon structure called the Gogli tendon apparatus, operated by your autonomic nervous system, that is probably stimulated by those Bowen moves to relax the muscle.

But we must also consider an unconventional point of view because we know that Bowen results will be better if the head is facing north during treatment, and also that the moves can be done on a first person who is touching a second person with the second person receiving the benefit. From this point of view we begin to consider that the mechanism may have something to do with harmonic vibration. Indeed, Pythagoras had set up a whole school of healing in ancient Greece based on this idea. So Bowen is unlike any other physical therapy. It is unique but can be compared to playing a stringed instrument.

One case in my practice illustrates very well the need to consider that Bowen has something to do with energy. G.P. had come to me for a classic case of chronic fatigue. In treating a patient with chronic fatigue you will have to eventually include some kind of energy medicine such as acupuncture or homeopathy. I chose to begin her treatment with nutrition and botanicals and we had very good results. Within 3 to 4 months, the energy was back to 80%. However the patient said she really had not regained her old 100% as a long distance runner and frenetic modern-day Mom. One month ago, about two years after her original visit, she came to me with wrist pain and wondered if, "This Bowen Therapy you do would help." I did a basic lower back, upper back and neck procedure followed by the arm-wrist procedure. One week later very little of the wrist pain was left, but even more remarkable, she now felt the energy of her former self - a 100%.

There are no age restrictions for Bowen Therapy. It can be done on newborns and infants and also on the very elderly. R.C., then 5 months old, suffered from colic. One treatment eliminated that. T.S., aged 10 months, had suffered from severe constipation since she started a cow's milk based formula at 3 months of age. After one treatment the baby, who had been crying in severe discomfort until then, filled her diaper, stopped crying, settled down comfortably and smiled at her mother who had tears of relief and gratitude in her eyes.

H.G., a lively 92 year old lady, suffering from spinal stenosis (a painful narrowing of the spinal column), is now able to rise from a lying to a sitting position with none of the former excruciating pain.

Every Bowen therapist always has a string of interesting stories. R.F., another spinal stenosis case had had to curtail squash and golf because of pain, numbness and weakness. After five treatments he was 80% improved and practically normal after 9 treatments. He is now golfing and playing squash again.

In a busy hotel lobby, just before lunch, I treated the pregnant wife of a colleague for nausea. She then joined them, with a great appetite, for lunch.

To finish I will just relate part of K.W.'s story. K.W. is a male (mid-thirties) who originally came to me with a ten-year history of fatigue, digestive upset, ringing in the ears, snoring, and depression which we dealt with in 2 weeks. Then he returned to "try this Bowen treatment you do" for chronic low back pain that he had had for most of his adult life. I did the basic lower back, upper back and neck procedures on him and asked him to return in a week to see if any further treatments were necessary. He returned a week later and said, "You know, I left your office last week thinking I had just been duped into taking one of the flakiest treatments I'd ever experienced… because it felt to me as if you hadn't done anything (the moves, as I said earlier, are very gentle). But, and I don't understand this, I don't have my low back pain anymore! I came back to see if you could something for my Achilles tendonitis." And we did. It took two treatments to resolve that!

Bowen Therapy is unique, gentle, and effective. It relieves pain and a host of other health problems.

Copyright: Bruce Lofting, N.D. 2001