Fascia, Our Mystery Organ

The organ science overlooked — and why it might be the key to your health, your pleasure, and your intuition

Can you believe there is an organ that stayed hidden from scientists until 20 years ago? With all the progress in medicine, you’d think that the basic task of mapping the body organs was completed a long time ago. What’s more to find?
Except for the clitoris — discovered and forgotten repeatedly, erased from textbooks whenever it inconvenienced the prevailing view of reproduction — we’d assume everything else had been mapped.

Not so fast. Less than 40 years ago, scientists started to suspect that fascia, the white membranous thing wrapped around muscles and organs, was way more than an inert wrapping, something to rip apart to reach the important things, recognising it as a continuous, living system sheathing every part of the body
Less than 20 years ago, the Inaugural Fascia Research Congress took place in 2007, unifying fragmented global research. Researchers showed that fascia acts as a massive sensory organ heavily populated with nerve endings, giving it a direct role in movement, force transmission, pain and pleasure.

So what is this ”new” organ hidden in plain sight until now?
Fascia is the connective tissue that wraps, separates, and connects everything — muscles, organs, nerves, and bones. It’s the body’s internal scaffolding. More, fascia is not alone in this exclusive club of recently discovered organs. The newcomer is the interstitium.
The interstitium is a massive, interconnected network of fluid-filled spaces found throughout the human body. It remaind hidden until now due to the lack of methods to investigate it. Modern imaging of live tissue revealed that a continuous system exists beneath the skin, lining organs, muscles, and circulatory vessels, and that it makes up approximately 20% of the body’s total fluid.

Imagine a massive sheet of layered collagenous fibres — this is fascia — and, located directly within and between those fibres, a multitude of flexible fluid-filled spaces — this is the interstitium.

Fascia and the interstitium are so closely interconnected that, from a practical point of view, they can be treated as one.
For a massage therapist like me, there is no difference: working with one means working with the other too.

The more I read about fascia and the interstitium, the more I kept asking myself the same question: “How is this not front-page news?”

In my opinion, this is one of the strongest cases for a more holistic approach in all of medicine.
Think about the most recognised non-traditional medicine systems, like Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Acupuncture, Ayurvedic Medicine, Chiropractic Care, Osteopathy, Yoga and Meditation: what all of those have in common?

The core belief is that the body is a unified organism, such that affecting one part affects all the others, and the treatment should address the whole, not the part.

And here you have it: two systems so pervasive that they connect everything in the body literally. To me, this is compelling structural evidence for what traditional medicine has been saying for centuries — that the body is not a collection of parts but a unified whole. It should give pause to anyone quick to dismiss holistic approaches, and it should make us think twice before any unnecessary intervention that disrupts that continuity — a liposuction, an elective caesarean — when no health risk is involved.

My guesses are that these are the three major factors that prevent the widespread adoption of any fascia-aware medicine.
One: suspicion. Words like “flow” and “holistic” have a funny reputation. I had many conversations with people about fascia, only to see their interest change to suspicion the moment they heard me using them.
If I have to guess, I bet their mind rapidly flashed a warning signal “snake oil seller” the moment they heard the words, and that changed their entire attitude from wanting to know more to watch for the moment I will sell them something.

The second is the oldest reason in the world: money. Preventive medicine is less profitable than what we have today. Healthy and informed people do not spend huge amounts on expensive pills and/or unnecessary surgical intervention, cosmetic surgery included.

A woman unhappy with the way her breasts look will think twice before deciding to go under the knife if she knows all the risks involved and the long-term effects that any intervention has on these two organs and, by extension, on the entire body.

Let me clarify an important point here. I do not want to endorse any conspiracy theories, nor do I want to point a finger at the medical community as a whole. It is my strongest belief that most of the medical community is composed of decent people who work hard to help the people who need them and do the best with what they have.

Even so, it is enough to take a look at all those articles about the times when a cosmetic surgery went horribly wrong to know that something should change in the way we see those interventions. Education about fascia and interstitium, their role in our health, and how unnecessary intervention can hurt those organs should be a cornerstone of any patient-oriented medical system.

Third: habits. It takes time and discipline to get in touch with your own body, to learn to listen and trust its signals. It takes time and discipline to move from a reductionist approach to a holistic one. Change is difficult, especially when it involves unlearning. And unlearning we need. Many of our automatic habits, the ones that come so naturally to us, are, in fact, wrong.

I remember how, as a teenager, I came across an article about respiration, saying that we are breathing wrong. It made me wonder if something as ingrained as breathing can be done wrong, what other of my habits are also wrong? The answer, as I know it now, is “a lot.”

As with any change, like losing 10 pounds through dieting and exercise, it also takes time and dedication. Putting aside an hour per day might look like an impossible task for many of us.

The good news is that learning to get in touch with our body is a very flexible endeavour. If you have 20 minutes/day, you can start.
In time, as we learn to sense what our bodies need and how they change with each session, those 20 minutes will become something to look forward to.

In time, you will find ways to integrate some of the exercises involved in other activities, or you will find it worth it to give up mindlessly watching the news for exercising.

And such a rich exchange it will be! Who wouldn’t change 30 minutes of worrying and depressing announcements for more vitality and the sweet joy of feeling good in your own body?

Search ‘how fascia improves your health and you’ll find plenty about flexibility, pain relief, and better posture. All true. All useful. But conspicuously absent from every list is what I consider fascia’s most extraordinary quality.

Our fascial network is estimated to house over 250 million nerve endings. Because of this, it is considered one of the body’s largest sensory organs, hosting significantly more nerve endings than your skin and up to 6 to 8 times more than muscle tissue.

Do you know what other organs are significantly higher in nerve endings than skin and muscle tissue? Genitalias.
In fact, fascia wraps the genitals as any other organ. The nerves there belong to fascia, too. The fact that sexual pleasure is felt primarily there is a matter of habit, not a rule set in stone.

Have you ever heard the expression “full body orgasm”? Fascia is what makes it possible.

Across neurology, psychology, and sexology, experts overwhelmingly agree that the brain is our largest and most important sexual organ. It dictates desire, controls arousal, processes all physical sensation, and holds the key to intimacy and pleasure.

I beg to differ: the brain is the most powerful sexual organ. Fascia is the largest. A good sexual life springs from the connections of these two.

Curious? Good. The explanation is in my next article.