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Does motor dominance create common compensatory patterns?

Cerebral lateralization has been a hot topic in neuroscience for centuries. How does it apply to body patterns we see in clinic, i.e., does right motor dominance cause hypertonicity in highly innervated tissues such as iliopsoas, rotatores, multifidi, scalenes, suboccipitals? Recall that the 11th cranial nerve innervates the upper traps and SCM. Do you look for and/or expect to see certain repeated structural patterns possibly due to motor dominance?

Check out this intriguing article in the new Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolutionary-origi...

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Permalink Reply by Jerry Hesch, MHS, PT on August 29, 2009 at 9:55am

Erik,
I certainly agree with your rhetorical(?) question.
On a related topic,clients with left sided pain syndromes have a much greaater affective experience \of pain, greater misery if you will due to right (dominance) brain processing. Of course, processing takes place in multiple areas on both hemispheres. I have that articel...somewhere, it was in JOSPT in '94 or 95, an edition dedicated to pain.
I have described "The Most Common Pattern of SI Joint Dysfunction" which is a whole body phenomenon, typically with compensation at the Occipio-atlanta and atlantoaxial joints. even left handed people get this pattern, and I submit that it is due in a large part, not on hemispherical dominance, but rather on the fact that we operate in a right-handed world. the way we get inn and out of the car, the desk in school, the way we open doors (by design-the placement of the handle and hinge, etc). Very rarely do I see someone with the opposite pattern. i saw a woman with the opposite and I inquired "You don't drive often, do you?" She said, NO, my husband drives me to work. She gets in on the passenger seat much more often than the typical adult in Western Society. I am sure that motor dominance feeds into this also.
Best Regards
jerry hesch, MHS
www.heschmanualtherapy.com

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Permalink Reply by Erik Dalton on August 29, 2009 at 2:07pm

I'd like to get back to you on this topic with some new research my friend but for now I'm backed up to a tight article deadline. Wish words would just flow outta my mouth and on to the paper like some authors. It's a real grind for an obsessive-compulsive disordered person like me. Maybe my corpus callosum is "log-jamed" with useless information.