🎙 Nerve Pain: Stop Blaming Compression (with Whitney Lowe & Til Luchau)

Ask almost any manual therapist what they learned about nerves in school, and you get some version of the same answer: not much.

Most of us were handed the wiring model. A nerve is a cable, it carries a signal, and there are two ways it goes wrong — something presses on it, or something pulls on it. It’s a tidy picture, it’s most of what our field has run on for decades, and it leaves out nearly everything that makes a nerve a nerve.

Whitney and Til go under the sheath. A peripheral nerve turns out to be a living organ with its own blood supply, its own nerve supply, a fascial architecture that mirrors muscle, and a slow river of axoplasm moving proteins the length of an axon that may run three feet from your sacrum to your big toe. Once you see it that way, the clinical picture changes: the first thing a little compression does isn’t block a signal, it stalls venous return, and the chemistry that follows is a big part of what your client actually feels.

They get practical about what that means on the table — why there’s an argument for getting on nerve problems sooner rather than waiting and seeing, why tensioners make better tests than treatments, why freeing the neighborhood usually beats going after the nerve itself, and why nerves respond to whispers rather than shouting. Along the way: fat wallet syndrome, updated for the age of the back-pocket phone; a rat pulling a lever for food, and the gentle hands-on work that kept it from developing nerve fibrosis; an enzyme sequestered since fetal development that can cause excruciating back pain while leaking out of a disc injury that may barely show up on imaging; a young Whitney in an Atlanta medical bookstore, broke, deciding to spring for a blue book called Mobilisation of the Nervous System; and a likely explanation for why your client feels it downstream of the problem.

✨ We talk about:
– Why nerves got so little airtime in our training — and why the field is expanding into them now
– Nerves as living organs: endoneurium, perineurium, epineurium, and why the architecture parallels muscle
– Vasa nervorum and nervi nervorum — a nerve’s own circulation, and its own sensation
– The pressure sequence: venous flow stalls first, then arterial, then intraneural — and the “toxic soup” that follows
– Neurapraxia, axonotmesis, neurotmesis — and why a damaged axon regrows at roughly a millimeter a day, about an inch a month
– The argument for early treatment: heading things off before neuropathic pain turns nociplastic
– Axonal transport, axoplasm, and double crush — what happens when you step on the garden hose
– Geoffrey Bove’s research: gentle, non-specific manual therapy that prevented nociceptor activity and neural fibrosis in a rat model
– Tensioners vs. sliders — why one is the better test and the other the better treatment
– Treat the container first: freeing a nerve’s surroundings before mobilizing the nerve
– A tour of the usual bottlenecks — scalene triangle, costoclavicular space, subpectoral, cubital tunnel, pronator teres, carpal tunnel
– And below the belt: disc margins, deep rotators, the hamstring septum, the peroneal (fibular) division at the lateral knee, tarsal tunnel, and Baxter’s neuropathy
– Pronator teres or carpal tunnel? What night pain and pain location tell you
– PLA2 and the leaking disc: severe nerve pain with little or nothing to see on imaging
– Local and unilateral vs. bilateral and systemic — a fast screening principle, plus diabetes, chemotherapy, and thyroid on the list
– The red flags you stop everything for: bilateral leg symptoms, saddle anesthesia, bowel or bladder changes
– Why symptoms usually show up distal to the site of compression — and why that’s a guideline, not a rule
– Whispers, not shouting: less force, slower pace, and the gardener rather than the heavy equipment operator

✨ And tell us what happened: when you backed off the pressure and worked the nerve’s neighborhood instead, what changed? Email us — we’d love to hear it.

✨ Resources:
– David Butler, Mobilisation of the Nervous System — the classic that put neural mobilization into practitioners’ hands
– David Butler & Lorimer Moseley, Explain Pain: https://www.noigroup.com
– Michael Shacklock, Clinical Neurodynamics
– Bove GM, et al. “Manual therapy prevents onset of nociceptor activity, sensorimotor dysfunction, and neural fibrosis induced by a volitional repetitive task.” PAIN, 2019: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30461558/
– Upton & McComas (1973), the original double crush paper in The Lancet
– Trail Guide to the Body, 7th edition — with a new primer on the nervous system: https://booksofdiscovery.com
– Whitney’s assessment and clinical reasoning resources: https://academyofclinicalmassage.com
– Til’s trainings, CAMT certification, and subscription library: https://advanced-trainings.com

🌱 Sponsor Offers:
– Jane – Try it free for one month with code THINKING1MO at https://a-t.tv/jane
– ABMP – Save on new membership at https://abmp.com/thinking
– Books of Discovery – Save 15% with code thinking at https://booksofdiscovery.com
– Advanced-Trainings – Try one month free of the A-T Subscription with code thinking at https://a-t.tv/subscriptions
– Academy of Clinical Massage – Grab Whitney’s free Assessment Cheat Sheet at https://academyofclinicalmassage.com/cheatsheet

✨ Watch the video / connect with us:
– YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AdvancedTrainings/podcasts
– Whitney Lowe – https://academyofclinicalmassage.com | https://facebook.com/WhitneyLowe | https://twitter.com/whitneylowe
– Til Luchau – https://advanced-trainings.com | https://facebook.com/advancedtrainings | https://instagram.com/til.luchau

📧 Email us: info@thethinkingpractitioner.com

The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is intended for professional practitioners of manual and movement therapies — bodywork, massage therapy, structural integration, physical therapy, osteopathy, and similar professions. It is not medical or treatment advice.

Your Hosts:

        Til Luchau                          Whitney Lowe

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