YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW ABOUT NAPRAPATHY: HERE GOES!

Although it was unfortunate that WholeHealth Chicago had to close our Riverwoods office because of a change of building ownership, one very definite positive was our Clybourn office gained Dr. Mary Ellen Boyte, D.N., who has been practicing Naprapathic Medicine since she graduated the National College here in Chicago in 2000.

You’ve seen the word “naprapathy” and probably like everyone else confused it with “naturopathy” (totally different!). Maybe you once saw a naprapath at a friend’s recommendation and now have a regular healer. Or maybe you just wondered what someone with the initials ‘D.N.’ after their name actually did for a living.

Now, you’ll learn. 

In what was probably a moment referring to himself, Saul Bellow, Chicago’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, once remarked that Chicagoans rarely acknowledge their heroes.  Today, I introduce a new ‘hero’ candidate. Beyond a small circle of naprapathic physicians, it’s unlikely any of you have ever heard of Dr. Oakley Smith, who, as a young Chicago chiropractor in the first decade of the 20^th century formulated the principles of naprapathy, a homegrown bodywork therapy. A reprint of his elegant text with dozens of charts is available from India, where naprapathy is quite popular.

The Chicago History Museum credits Chicago with the first blood bank, the first heart bypass surgery, deep dish pizza, and Tootsie Roll but misses Dr. Smith. It takes Google to hunt him down. 

During his chiropractic training, Dr. Smith learned the basic chiro principle that all illness was caused by misalignment of the vertebrae, the bones in the spine. If you had chronic heart disease, for example, a misalignment of the vertebrae at the level of your heart blocked not only the blood and nerve pathways to the heart, but also your body’s own subtle energies. These are the same energies the Chinese call qi, Indian Ayurvedic physicians call prana, and a variety of US and European practitioners manipulate through Reiki and Healing Touch.

Dr. Smith felt this was a mistake. Illness was trapped energy in the muscles, tendons, ligaments and not misalignment of the spine. This key historical divergence, illness was not the misaligned spine but in the soft tissues, formulated in 1908, became known as “Smith’s Schism”, and created naprapathy. A naprapath, or someone trained in myofascial release therapy, feels these blockages as chronic muscle contractions. They occur as a result of old but unhealed injury, psychological conflict, poor nutrition, or poor posture.

 Now, a century later, there are dozens of naprapaths in Illinois and in several countries around the world. Dr. Smith cobbled together an entire system of health and illness, combining the Czech word naprapavit (to correct) and the Greek pathos (suffering) to produce a term that means “to correct the cause of suffering”. By the way, it’s pronounced “nuh-PRAH-pa-thee”, emphasis on the second syllable.

Bodywork therapies like osteopathy, chiropractic, and naprapathy to treat actual organic physical illnesses may sound really strange to our 21^st century scientific thinking. However, when you realize that back in the 19^th century, surviving surgery was a coin toss, ‘wonder drugs’ were decades in the future, some herbal patent medicines worked, most didn’t, at least spinal manipulation or the deep tissue therapy of naprapathy didn’t kill you.

I expect to receive some comments from naprapaths with this comparison to myofascial release, but in both therapies the practitioner palpates connective tissue, feeling for areas that are contracted, rigid, and painful. Then, using a series of rhythmic manipulations, the contraction is stretched and released. Once the tension is cleared, there’s restoration of proper nerve and blood flow, healing energies travel without obstruction, and the body begins to function again. Myofascial therapists press deeply, reaching into the “trigger points”.

This difference between a naprapath and a myofascial release therapist is an important one. First, the correct term for a naprapath is naprapathic physician. And as a physician–similar to a chiropractic physician–he or she is licensed to diagnose and treat symptoms. On the other hand, myofascial release therapists are specially trained in their own field who rely on their client’s physician to make a correct diagnosis, order tests and prescribe therapy. Our wonderful Myofascial Trigger Point Therapist Mary Biancalana, M.S. focuses specifically on myofascial tissues, the thick network of connective tissues that surround and support muscles, organs, bones and nerves.

Dr. Smith would go on to establish the first of two schools of naprapathy, the Chicago College of Naprapathy on Milwaukee Avenue. A rival school actually formed directly across the street a couple of decades later, the Illinois College of Naprapathy, and then, finally, bygones being bygones, the two merged into the National College of Naprapathy, still on Milwaukee Avenue. (I mean, Milwaukee and Belmont, how “Chicago” can you get?).

The problem naprapathy faced during its 100+ years is the same threat all alternative practitioners have endured—hostility from the medical establishment. Interestingly in the case of naprapathy, opposition came not only from the usual suspects, including medical doctors (MDs and DOs), but also from chiropractors (DCs), who resented Smith’s ‘schism’, and physical therapists, who routinely side with the establishment.

The result of this many-fronted assault is that after all these years, naprapaths are officially licensed in just two states, Illinois and New Mexico. Curiously, naprapathy is more known on a worldwide basis and was exported decades ago to the Scandinavian countries where there are twice as many naprapaths as chiropractors.

Interested readers residing in those vast areas where no naprapaths practice should look for a myofascial release therapist. The commonest remarks I hear after a patient has experienced a session of myofascial release from our own Mary Biancalana: “That’s like no massage I’ve ever had before. It was amazing. My muscles feel like they’ve opened up.”

Exactly. Whether you call the session naprapathy or myofascial release, what it definitely is NOT, is a massage.

One compelling offshoot of both naprapathy and myofascial release therapy centers on the emotional issues that can be trapped in locked and contracted muscles. This has its origin in the “muscular armoring” theory of Wilhelm Reich, a colleague of Sigmund Freud. In fibromyalgia, for example, patients often have unconsciously locked memories of a dreadful childhood event literally into their muscles. Releasing the muscles releases the memory and the patient can start on a fast track to getting well. I discuss muscular armoring at length in my book Healing Fibromyalgia.

Now you know something about naprapathy’s Chicago history that has eluded our otherwise excellent Chicago History Museum.

Be well,

David Edelberg, MD