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Dermatome and fasciatome

PainSci » bibliography » Stecco et al 2019
updated

One page on PainSci cites Stecco 2019: Does Fascia Matter?

PainSci notes on Stecco 2019:

This paper tries hard to use fascia as a way to explain the imprecision of dermatomal patterns (areas of skin sensation arising from nerve roots), a well-known phenomenon that has a variety of simpler explanations, and wasn’t particularly in need of another one. It even substantially duplicates an existing idea (sclerotomes).

While potentially interesting and not necessarily all wrong, the paper is generally poor quality, overconfidently reaching well beyond both evidence and plausibility in a variety of ways, but it’s basically just a partisan opinion about why fascia matters — which is catnip for fascia therapists, who are starved for scientific legitimacy and have frequently cited this paper as if it actually matters. It really doesn’t.

original abstract Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

Increased knowledge of the rich innervation of the deep fascia and its anatomical organization indicates the need to reevaluate maps of the dermatome according to the new findings. The authors present a distinction between dermatome and fasciatome, basing their approach to the literature on nerve root stimulation and comparing dermatomeric and myomeric maps. The former represents the portion of tissue composed of skin, hypodermis, and superficial fascia supplied by all the cutaneous branches of an individual spinal nerve; the latter includes the portion of deep fascia supplied by the same nerve root and organized according to force lines to emphasize the main directions of movement. The dermatome is important for esteroception, whereas the fasciatome is important for proprioception. If they are altered, the dermatome shows clearly localized pain and the fasciatome irradiating pain according to the organization of the fascial anatomy. Clin. Anat. 32:896-902, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:

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