Scar Tissue Treatment & Proper Stretching

Essentials for Your Health

Guest on Dr. Mitchell’s The Smartest Doctor in the Room Podcast

I recently had the pleasure of joining Dr. Dean Mitchell on his podcast The Smartest Doctor in the Room to discuss how scar tissue treatment and proper stretching can improve your life.

DR. DEAN MITCHELL

So we have all experienced the cuts and bruises in our lives, and many of us have actually gone under the knife, you know, for a surgical procedure. Afterward, we are left with a scar that over time will fade, but just sometimes doesn’t feel like our original skin in medical school. One of my first pathology lectures was all about, inflammation and healing and actually how scar tissue forms with the connective tissue coming in. But I have to tell you, for the rest of my medical training, I never heard another word about scar tissue or how it affects us.

My guest today, Marjorie Brook, is an internationally known educator and medical massage therapist who has spent over 30 years in her career caring for and teaching healthcare practitioners about her expertise. You know, as I’ve mentioned before, to patients, I’m pretty open-minded, and obviously, though I have a medical degree and I’m a conventional doctor and I do a lot of holistic medicine, I’m always searching to find people doing unusual things that I think could benefit my patients that I wanna learn more about. And I was really fortunate cause I had a really smart patient that is a mutual patient of Marjorie’s and myself. And when I heard what Marjorie was doing, I was very curious. And we got to meet up. And I’ve actually come to her as a patient and I think she does great work. And I just really wanted her on the podcast to talk about her work with scar tissue and some of the other things she does. So it’s my pleasure to welcome Marjorie Brook to the podcast.

Okay, so the first thing we will get into is scar tissue. Cause that’s what actually got me interested in meeting you. This was all right before COVID broke. I dunno if you remember we got to finally meet at a conference you came to, I was speaking and you came to attend, which was, you know, really nice. As  I mentioned in the introduction, you know, scars tend to remind us of an injury or an operation. And sometimes also even psychologically kind of tells us that we’re no longer perfect. But maybe you could give sort of a broad overview of what, how, what you see, you know, how you look at scar tissue and if you could even explain to some degree what a scar is.

What’s the Issue with Scar Tissue?

MARJORIE BROOK

Well, basically when people think of scars, they think mainly of the aesthetic look of how it altered the way they look. But what people really don’t understand is that scar tissue can affect every single system in the body.

I’m not saying that every single scar is an issue, but every single scar has the potential to be an issue. And people don’t even realize that the scar tissue is actually causing a problem because the doctors don’t talk about it. All the pains that people have or things that people say, oh, it’ll, it’ll fade in time, or it’s just going to be that way can actually usually be traced back to the scar tissue. Scar tissue is actually the tissue that replaces the tissue that’s been injured. All right. And a lot of people hear things about breaking up scar tissue and taking scar tissue away.

Well, you really can’t do that. Scar tissue literally has to be there. Every wound heals with some form of scarring and it’s meant to be there. And the point is, you just have to understand that it’s not as effectively able to behave and perform as well as normal tissue. It’s only about 80% as functional as normal tissue at its best. But scar tissue left on its own can have multiple issues and multiple problems. It can run rampant, it can spread through the body, it can cause restrictions, it can cause poles, it can interfere with the, uh, circulatory system. It can interfere with the electromagnetic system in our body. It interferes with the energy. If you’re gonna go with traditional Chinese medicine, it actually can block and interfere with everything in this, in the, in this in our body with every single system.

DR. DEAN MITCHELL

Okay. I’m going to stop you there because that’s a lot to swallow.

You always provide a lot of information. But I want to try to take a little bit simpler and then No, and then we’re gonna go deeper. So again, the way I visualize it, and you know, what’s interesting is because scar tissue could be on the skin, as you know, on the tendons, on muscles, internal organs, I guess. And I tend to think of, again, from my medical training as scar tissue being, see this is where the problem is almost like glue or, you know, that’s like a layman’s term, but the, the collagen coming in, which is not the original tissue. Right. So just for example, I mean, if you get a scar on your face, I mean, you have what we call dermal cell epidermal and dermal cells. And then where that cut is, whether it’s, you know, done by a doctor or if you got an injury, that tissue comes in and heals and it’s collagen tissue, which is not the exact same tissue. Am I saying this correctly as the original skin tissue? So it’s like almost like a filler?

MARJORIE BROOK

Well, no, a part of it actually. It’s pretty much formed out of the same materials. Only it gets excessive collagen. Too much collagen. Cause you have collagen in your regular tissues. What it is, is, is the way the tissue, uh, re-knits itself together, if you think of the collagen fibers as threads that are all getting basket weaved in to fill in the the scar where formally the tissue went like this. Right now the tissues are like this and this is the problem.

DR. DEAN MITCHELL

It’s almost like essentially sewing up the tissue so it gets stronger because scar tissue is not as strong as the original tissue. Is that correct?

MARJORIE BROOK

Correct. So at its best left, if it’s healed as best as it can, scar tissue is about 70 to 80% as functional as normal tissue, which means it’s not as stronger. It’s actually weaker. And it can interfere with the tension like your skin is meant to, has tension to pull in a certain way. But if you have a cross now, it can’t do that. Now it’s pulling.

DR. DEAN MITCHELL

Now there are some limitations.

MARJORIE BROOK

Yeah. It’s not, it’s not moving the way it was designed, it’s limited and those poles can end up  pulling throughout the whole body. It’s like one big chain. Right. And you can have a scar on your shoulder and it could be pulling and end up causing a problem down by your ankle on the other side of the body.

Does the Scars Age Make a Difference in Its Impact on the Body?

DR. DEAN MITCHELL

Wow. Does it matter also how old a scar is? Especially like when you see patients, I mean, obviously maybe till somebody finds out about you, their scar is 10 years old or, you know, or, um, maybe someone’s fortunate and they’ve seen you in the last six months when they noticed a scar either wasn’t healing right. Or was giving them problems. So does that matter to you when you’re caring for them?

MARJORIE BROOK

It doesn’t matter how old a scar is. I’ve worked on scars as old as 80 years old and made a difference. Our tissue is very elastic and we can alter and change our tissue. That’s not an issue. The connective tissue, the fascia is. The best thing is you wanna start working with the body as soon as you have the injury and not necessarily working, you won’t allow the first three months to allow the body to actually scar. It’s supposed to scar. Right. That’s how. Right, right. Unfortunately, people go after the scar way to the injury too soon to avoid a scar. Like they actually make a worse scar because they don’t allow the body time to heal.

DR. DEAN MITCHELL