Amatsu in Detail
The information in this section is reproduced from Dennis Bartram’s ‘Spinal and Pelvic Dynamic’s, Anma Module with his kind permission.
In the modern world, we believe that the science of biotensegrity offers the best description of some of the fundamentals of Amatsu’s approach, and explains how our body structures work together and therefore affect each other when damaged. Our practitioners are taught to understand how an injury or illness within one part of the body will always have a global impact elsewhere within the body.
It was in the 1970s that Dr Stephen Levin first conceived of this ‘Law of Tensegrity’ entitled ‘biotensegrity’. It is with the kind permission of Dr Levin that we reproduce the history and principles of biotensegrity within this website. For further information on his work please see his website http://www.biotensegrity.com.
Amatsu’s whole body, tensegrous approach helps the body to regain its natural balance and movement by identifying and releasing injuries or distortions, allowing biotensegrity to be re-established within the body.1
Dr Levin’s work on biotensegrity started in the mid 1970s, when he was a young orthopaedic surgeon trying to understand what he was doing as a ‘body mechanic’. He was taught during his residency training by some of the top biomechanics of the time. Yet the teaching was still based on the application of first year college physics to biologic structures and particularly how it applied to the human frame. This has been, and continues to be, the most widely accepted explanation of the mechanics of body movement. It was first described by Giovanni Borelli (an Italian mathematician, physiologist, physicist and ‘renaissance man’) in 1680 in his publications De Motu Animalium I and De Motu Animalium II, and in essence it has changed little since then. These theories are all based on Newtonian mechanics as they would be applied to a column or building built with rigid materials and standing in one place on solid ground.
