Healing from the Jaw, with Bowen Therapy and Ron Phelan on The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger

started the Bowen back in 96 I certainly started treating people here in this area in Geelong, and the…so it was quite an interesting feeling, having people come in and say, Oh, look, I’d like to try this other therapeutical Bowen, you know, and they say, Oh, I used to go to Tommy Bowen. Yeah, he fixed me in one go and you think, okay, so, put a little bit of pressure on you. But through the Bowen journey, I was very fortunate that the time when I started using the Bowen in the early in the mid 90s, that two of Tom students were still practicing here in Geelong. And one of those Dr. Kevin Ryan, who is an osteopath and the last person to learn from Tom, or observed Tom from Tom. I ended up being a patient of his for about three years, and I certainly noticed that there was lots of differences in the way he approached the work compared to what I’ve been taught. And then also, I met the other gentleman who still practicing and is still currently practicing, in fact, the only one of the six thats still practicing. And that’s Dr. Romney Smeaton and Romney invited me to observe him in 2002. So I used to go went to his clinic every second weekend, for Tuesday morning and watch him work, I did that for 18 months or so and asked him questions. And once again his version of the work was different. He was a chiropractor as I mentioned, Dr. Ryan was an osteopath. So they had a different philosophy a different approach, but probably out of the two of them, they were more similar because they they would get together and cross fertilize ideas and discuss, observe, Tom do. And I also through the opportunity of spending some time with the lady who worked with Tom, right from the very start back in 1956-57. And spent four years with her before she passed and just learned a lot about the development of the work the history and you know, some of the anecdotal stories that she told me. It was just really, really quite heartwarming to hear about little kids, you know, getting up and walking with they’ve never been able to walk before. So, out of the five, actually out of the six of the original, we’ll say the original students of Tom, I’ve had the opportunity to meet five of those and had treatment from four of them, and then training really from three. So my interpretation of the Bowen has really been a bit of an eclectic mix of what I saw and experience through these other people. And as you do you develop your own little approaches along the way, as you come across situations that may not resolve in the way, in the manner that you anticipated. So you have to look outside the box. And I guess that’s where the engineering brain came in, and so on, how do I approach this and work out a way to find an end result. So moving forward 2007, I was teaching a style of Bowen, which was only taught to qualified practitioners from about 2001. And that in working with qualified practitioners, RMTs and Osteo’s, and Chiro’s and physios that they weren’t just happy to accept that this was going to work, they wanted to see a quantitative output of the work, not the work and want to see if what you’re saying was going to work with the lower back procedure was going to produce a change in lower back, they want to see that. So I was asked, I guess, during teaching those years, I would introduce some of the assessments like ladders and RMT. And then other things that I sort of developed myself, and started to show people, okay, this is what it looks like now. This is where you do the technique. And this is the outcome, you can see the difference. And that I was asked to teach a workshop to cover all of the Bowen procedures that that we use. So I did that. And that became a separate workshop. And that included the temporomandibular joint, which was part of the Bowen suite of of protocols. And then another event happened in 2000. And what actually happened for that in 2004, where I met a orthodontist in the US, Dr. Brendan Stack, and I was taken to his clinic in just on the corner of Washington DC called Tyson’s Corner. And that I went to his clinic and observed. I met him basically and we got on really, really well. And he gave me some notes. And we talked about different things and was very encouraging of what I was trying to do, which was at that time to put a presentation together on TMJ. And it was quite interesting. I really had no idea what to expect. So because he was an orthodontist who came into this room, sitting in the waiting room, sort of people coming in, and like in wheelchairs and sort of all sorts of physical dysfunctions. And they were walking out. I remember walking out looking at the front door and I said Dr. Brendan Stack DDS eccetera. I’m thinking, doesn’t say faith healer here. Whats going on? And so explained to me sort of very basically what he was doing, and then he gave me a whole bunch of notes and I was presenting in Canberra the following year, at a conference, massage conference, and I thought I focus on the TMJ. And he gave me an all VHS for those who remember what a VHS tape was, and to play, and it was had a whole bunch of case studies that he’d worked on. So I went back in 2005 met him again. And he looked at what I had put together to present, he made a few little changes. And gave me a DVD of the case studies, which was made it easier to present that, and I did the presentation 2005 in Canberra, and too much to a lot of astonished looks on people’s faces that by adjusting the jaw, you could make this a significant changes in the body. Moving forward, and this sort of coincided now with the assessment course that I started teaching the assessment course, in both Australia and New Zealand and UK. And then I got an invitation from Dr. Stack to attend one of his workshops now, as a body worker…body workers don’t get invited to methodic workshops is you have to be a dentist or orthodontist to go to an orthodontic workshop. But for some reason, he invited me I received this email and I thought, what do I do here and I thought about for a while, I really didn’t know what I would learn being a bodyworker and would I even be able to comprehend what was being spoken about. Because the terminology that’s used in dentistry is very different to normal anatomy and physiology. I went along to the workshop not really knowing, I thought it was a great opportunity to catch up with Dr. Stack again. And that was really the game changer because Dr. Stack talked in more detail about what he was doing and how he achieved that. So other dentists and other people in the room could understand his approach. And so that was a workshop. It was a couple of days in Washington, DC. And that was a whole bunch of notes and a couple more videos.

Manon Bolliger  12:11

And Ron, what, just to clarify his his understanding of how the jaw works is not necessarily one that is understood or seen by other orthodontist. Right. He had a…

Ron Phelan  12:29

Well, yeah, it’s a good question, because he said to me that the principles that he was using was taught to him as an orthodontist, and he studied dentistry in the 60s, I think it was, and then he did his orthodontic work after that. So he was quite astounded. And he made the comment that this concept was taught in dentistry…not in dentistry, taught in orthodontics, but the principles wasn’t being used by many people. And subsequently, what happened? I spoke to people here in Australia, asking about that as well. And they said, oh, yes, that was a big thing in the 80s. You know, everyone was, was trying to do that, but it didn’t give the desired outcome. So it sort of lost favor. And the reason that it didn’t give the desired outcomes because they weren’t actually hitting the mark. They just weren’t getting it. And Dr. Stack had been doing this for nearly 50 years. So he’s very experienced. So he would make an appliance to align the jaw in the position that the body required to be in. And that’s really the difference. So I fundamentally that was the concept. But what Dr. Stack’s approach was, he said, Forget about the teeth, the teeth, are not…their secondary to the jaw. His approach was if somebody came in with a dysfunction, he would, he would look at their teeth, obviously, you look at their jaw take MRIs and X rays, and then say, right, the jaw is in the wrong position. This has been caused, in many cases by the teeth. So therefore, we have to remove the teeth from the equation. So in doing that, he would make a splint and they would, and that would clip into the usually the lower jaw. And then when they are biting down, they would bite into the splint rather than their teeth. So their occlusion now was not defined by their teeth but by the splint. So in doing that, it would put the jaw back into its ideal position. That would immediately remove the symptoms in most cases or certainly over time. And then as the jaw all healed and stabilized, he would be altering the appliance because the healing would change the dynamic of the jaw. And that, in turn would, if the splint was made for, you know, the January, now we’re looking at the March or the April than that, there would be some changes, so he would have to alter the splint accordingly. But if the teeth were noticeably in the wrong position, he would put braces on and then start to move the teeth to where the teeth should be to maintain the jaw position. So that was really, I mean, it’s so basic, that it’s sort of like you wonder why it’s not a concept that is being used in dentistry.

Manon Bolliger  15:47

You describe it with, you know, with a hinge and it was a farming, you had a guy. Yeah, that was, yeah, that, you know, most people are looking at the fence post, as the teeth wanting that to be straight, whereas he was going, well, we’re gonna get the hinge in the right position. And then the rest will work out or something like this, right?

Ron Phelan  16:11

Yeah, that was for that conference we did in 2015, with Dr. Stack in the UK. And I was walking through a field in Yorkshire with my friend who you’ll meet in a few months. And I was looking for an analogy, and there was this farm gate. And unlike a lot of farm gates, we’ve all walked through a farm we get under the latch, and then you have to sort of Lift the gate to open the gate thing go through and put the latch back on. So what’s happened is here, the hinges are representative of the of the TMJs. And the latch, in this case is the teeth. But you know, in a farming gate, there’s only one tooth one, one upper left lower, like the connection. Whereas in in your in a human, we have up to 16 latches, because there’s, we’re designed to have 16 teeth in the uppers and 16 the lowers. So if the hinges are not perfect, then what’s the chances of those 16 letters all meeting in unison and stabilizing, it’s almost impossible. So the hinge the hinges there are the primary. And as Dr. Stack says, the teeth are not important initially because the teeth can, in many, many cases, be causing the issue. Because as you bite when you bite down, like that, the teeth will ultimately dictate the jaw position. So therefore, if the teeth misaligned, then that’s going to put the stress back onto the jaw. And like every, every joint in the body, every part of the body really has a range that it will function within quite happily. But when you go outside that range, what we call the physiological adaptive range, then you become symptomatic and become dysfunctional. And in many cases for TMJ, it becomes pain. So that means that yeah, a lot of the you know, things like lower backs and problems can be coming from the jaw. In fact, the work we were doing in the UK, I was working in the UK for seven years in a dental clinic and in amongst my teaching commitments, and we were finding there that about three quarters of people with TMJ dysfunctions, three quarters of those teams gay was causing problems throughout the body. The only 25% was saying the pelvis was causing the TMJ to be out. So that primarily means if there’s a large number of people, I think it was around about 80-85% people coming into the dental clinic had seen some form of TMJ dysfunction, and of that 80-85%, three quarters of those, the TMJ was causing problems down in the body. So many, many clients, people come in with all sorts of other ailments. And despite adjusting the teeth and getting the jaw back into the right position, those ailments would go away. And these people have tried all sorts of other treatments to try and get rid of it. But they are treating the symptom not the cause.

Commercial Break  19:27

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Ron Phelan  20:10

So, yeah, so I, after doing that course with Dr. Stack in 2008, I came back to Australia. And I wrote to him and said to me, who can you recommend. And here in Australia, it really was only one person who’d taken his training and was on board with that. And that’s a gentleman out of Sydney, who also spoke at that conference in 2015. And so I contacted him that sort of started connecting with him. And that subsequently, out of that, I ended up presenting to his Dental Group in 2011, about what I was the approach I was using. So in 2008, I came back, I had no idea how I was going to find this ideal position, because Dr. Stack was using MRIs, X rays and all sorts of interesting equipment to find out where the jaw position was, and how to what size appliance to make to bring it back into its ideal position. But I didn’t have access to all that equipment. And it took me about just over two years of trialing different methods, once again, engineering, analytical brain kicking in saying, Well, okay, this is what you’re trying to achieve. How do we do it. And I eventually figured out a way I sort of little, a bright light came in my treatment room one day, and I went, Oh, this is interesting. And a lot of things went into the waste bin. In the meantime, yeah, different trialing different things. But so about 2010, I finally found the way to find this position. And so different with Dr. Stack, he was using appliances to hold the jaw in that position, where I didn’t have that option, either. So I was, I knew once I found the position, I thought, well, that’s pretty cool. That’s doing what I had anticipated. But it was what I hadn’t anticipated was when you do the Bowen moves when the jaw was stabilized in this position. Then, and the stabilization was a temporary stabilization site, it was using like tongue depressors, to find this jaw position. Once you did the Bowen moves, with the jaw in that position, you could remove the stabilizing sticks. In most cases, probably 70-80% of the time, the benefit was still there, but the advantage of what you’ve done. So my understanding of that is that it widened this, range this adaptive range. But not only did it for the jaw, but because it was it was descending patterns, like problems from the jaw, going down through the rest of the body pelvisis would change and internal external rotation of the hips and all sorts of things would change. And that’s after the Bowen correction had been done. So that together, the concepts that I learned from Dr. Stack, about the correct jaw position, along with the Bowen moves, just made has amazing outcome.

Manon Bolliger  23:42

Well, I can certainly speak to that. From I mean, you know, I had learned the basic TMJ. And, you know, it’s like, you don’t know if you’ve put it in the right position. But you knew in retrospect, if it helped the whole body, but you can’t know in the moment because we had nothing to base it on. Right and then after your methodology, which took me a little while to because I work very intuitively so I could never teach that but I got it I understood what you were doing and then it changes everything. It’s just like once the body knows that this is the… and it’s almost like it recognizes this is the right position. Now it’s not in fight and flight. It’s comfortable and and we’re programmed to heal right so it seems like from there, not only would it last, you know week after week, but it allowed us so many other parts too, to self correct without having to do anything specific. So quite amazing.

Ron Phelan  24:58

To be honest, we that was the part I hadn’t even I probably hadn’t even thought about that part, I was very much focused on getting the position right. And hadn’t sort of considered what the long term effect would be not having a splint. And I hadn’t had not anticipated the power of the Bowen moves in conjunction with that. And, as I said, for it, it not only changed it for the jaw, but it changed it for the rest of the body. And, you know, and, like, I like all types of parts of bodywork, sometimes it needed two or three goes, depending on what the circumstances were, I’ve often find, I’d say, between one and three treatments is usually what it takes. But I’ve had situations with the most powerful results I’ve ever had, in the 30 or 30 years of practicing, has been in classes where people have come in, practitioners have come in with all sorts of issues, because the practitioner is supposed to be perfectly balanced and healed. And sometimes I look at the practitioners of the class and I think, okay, you dont look that healthy, but just a couple of a couple of examples of that was where a lady in 2013, so 10 years ago, in England, and she attended the class with a right eye and legally rotated by about five or six degrees. And you know, and so when you’re looking at you didn’t know which I’d be looking at which one was the straight one, which one’s the, you know, when she was turning and looking at you. But she had a correction done, had a massive reaction to it. And she was bit sort of shell shocked by it all. We got her into the tea room, got a cup of tea into her and she stabilized and she came into the room 10 minutes later, we’re waiting for her and she just said, I’ve come out of the cubicle into the bathroom, kind of the cubicle and went up to wash my hands and my eye is now straight. And I didn’t know she said, she said I’ve got kicked in the head by a horse, I think it was 22 years earlier, she had sorts of treatments. When she came in, went to wash her hands look the mirror her I was straight, and she had right hand peripheral vision, which she hadn’t had for 22 years now driving in the UK, as in Australia, we drive on the other side of the road, the right sides, really, really important side to be able to see and not the have her right peripheral vision for 22 years must have been very difficult. And now that was that was 10 years ago. And she’s one treatment and I didn’t even do the treatment, I just made sure the jaw is in the right position. And she stabilized. It corrected it and it stayed that way for for 10 years. And was occasion in Germany where lady she had her her Atlas was out. And what also happens with the jaw is the jaw pain part of the cranial system. Because the jaw is sitting fiddling with the temporal bone, the temporal bone articulates to the sphenoid bone and any movement in the sphenoid bone or the other bones in the cranium have to adjust to compensate. And that relates also back through to the Atlas axis. So we find that a lot of old issues can have Atlas axis issues which don’t get and usually will not get corrected through your normal Bowen moves. On certainly not as fun power. And she she’d broken a leg when she was a kid she was in a plaster six weeks physiotherapy. And she couldn’t swim properly. She said I didn’t know at the time, but I went to set up her jaw to correct the jaw. But the Atlas was out and had to be corrected. So the Atlas was created in conjunction with the jaw. And you have to do both at the same time. Otherwise, one will pull the other one out. And two weeks later, she wrote to me and she said, You know I broke my leg when I was six or seven complete break. Fibula, tibia. And I was in plaster. I mean, I swear I couldn’t kick my leg properly, she said. And after having the correction of the jaw with the Atlas, she could now swim properly for the first time in 37 years. And that was I didn’t even know about this. You know, I was like this is just an outcome from and it’s not…I’ve had people write to me who’ve done the class and I’m getting quite amazing results.

Manon Bolliger  29:47

Well, yeah, one of the things you might not because when you’re teaching it to I mean there’s also a group dynamic you know, where we come in all wanting to help others. And secretly though we all desperately need help, because most practitioners don’t take the time, you know, to get the care that they need. I think that’s one of our, our main, our main faults, but what I was gonna say about what I noticed with this move in my practice, and it really helped me understand in doing Bowen College that we have to understand the mental emotional aspects of what people go through, you know, we are one whole being and though this is physical, if you aren’t prepared for the release the traumas, the everything, like you’re explaining, you know, her leg got better. Well, you know, it’s sure it’s jaw related ish. But certainly the trauma is, you know, and so it just brings such a depth of, of healing in this technique, which I just find and this move in, specifically, I think, I’ve seen just so many things happen with just the precision of that move done, right? It’s really something.

Ron Phelan  31:19

Yeah.Well that was the issues. The issue was the preciousion and I use the analogy of a combination lock. And if you tutn the lock on a big safe and its got the big dial there, and your spinning the dial around, you have the get exactly the numbers in the right sequence or the lock will not open. An thats what happens with the jaw position. You could be a hair thickness out and it wont open. You have to be exactly on it and thats where Dr Stack god bless him, he was just so experienced in doing this. And I think with his training he would sort of show them what to do but he just knew had that intuitive compenent that you cant teach it just comes from experience and having and understanding and I guess having that inherent ability but he could look at this apploance and grind a fraction off it and that would makes the diffeence if the person could walk or not. And I guess with what i was able to achieve was a systematic way of finding that that is reproducable. People taking the clas they can do it in the calss and take it back and use it in their clinic right away. Last year, well this was going for awhile now it was about 7 years in the development a good friend of mine over a lady by the name of Chris Freeman said you need a wall chart so people can follow whats going on and have it on their wall so they can look at it quickly. So we created a wall chart for people who have take the class. And this is based around the second day and covers the first day promary work and the second day of the TMJ class does a lot of assessments. And probably just a little bit of an expalnation there. The first day covers a lot of theroty information expaling how the TMJ works the pathology behind it and we look at case studies and all that to give people a raeally good understanding of the TMJ. And I have dentists take my class and they dont know this stuff. So its quite indepth and then the second day we move forward with those concepts and what i want to show is how one move or one series its about 5 moves for people who arent aware or havent taken Bowen training I show in 5 moves and within those 5 moves bilaterally they can make a significant change throughout the body. So the seoncd day where looking at all sorts of things like hip position leg lengths, all sorts of types of potential dysfunstions potential axis issues shoulder problems and the participants are working pair so they catalahuoe a complete overview of the body of that person of their partner on that day. And at the end of the day they will do one little procedure which I would say is 5 minutes with the primary move being the one on the jaw and I would say 96 of the time verything changes on that person everything bounces out. And I dont know any other technique that can have such a profound effect on the body that the TMJ will have in that instance.

Manon Bolliger  35:18

Well, Ron, our time is up. But I think it ends perfectly. Yeah. And this will play longer, but those who are interested, Bowen College will be hosting Ron, and this is now coming up in September. So the dates are all there, there’ll be listed by this video as well. If you know them by heart, feel free to say so I’d have to look them up. I don’t want to misguide people. But yeah, and it’s really an opportunity to have you here. And I look forward to it again. So thank you, Ron. Yeah, and really for inventing this move putting this together, you know.

Ron Phelan  36:08

Well, I’d have to thank Dr. Stack for he’s, he was the he was the motivator. And I wouldn’t have been aware of the concept had I not taken that class, and for him to invite me. So all of all the ducks lined up and turned up at that class. And, and as a result of that, yes. And it was just probably my enquiring mind, that got me from the next step to come out with this. And one, wanting to improve what we’re doing, I guess, we’re all doing things to help each other and help the world. The world needs a lot of support. And a lot of people deal with a lot of stuff that, as you said, not only physical and emotional. So this is certainly a great conference add attribute to their skills. And I should mention that we would like people to have about three years of experience for coming taking the class so they’ve ready for it, they’ve got a lot of practice, they know what the work can do, and then they can see the benefit of this work. So thank you for the opportunity to speak.

ENDING: 41:33

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