Food takes a very circuitous route on its journey through your body and can directly influence how you think and feel. Once you swallow, mashed up food works its way down behind your heart in a tube called your esophagus then passes through your diaphragm together with giant blood vessels where it connects with your stomach. Your digestive tract has a series of sphincters that act as a gating mechanism to control the passage of material through the system. You have probably experienced times when the gates seemed eager to open and your body wants everything out and other times when the gates seem slammed shut and nothing is moving. These muscular sphincters are influenced by your emotional state, the health of your gut, the balance of good versus bad bacteria, and the types of food you are exposing your system to.
Your stomach is a muscular bag that is tucked under the left, front side of your ribcage. It has a sphincter on both ends that ideally hold food in the stomach long enough for it to play its part in the digestion process. Sometimes the top sphincter can malfunction and inadvertently allow food and stomach acid back up into the esophagus which can generate chest and throat discomfort. Other times the stomach can get bloated or inflamed and cause your body to tense and guard your left side in reaction to the discomfort stemming from the organ. It is also important to point out that nothing must be wrong with an organ for it to feel uncomfortable. Our organs are part of how we experience emotions and are prone to getting over or under reactive in response to our social interactions, hence the term “butterflies in my stomach,” when a person is nervous. Stress and anxiety related to a need to perform can be the driving force behind recurrent stomach discomfort and tension around the left trunk, shoulder, and abdomen.
From the stomach, partially digested food passes into a smaller tube called your duodenum across the front of your abdomen and then transitions into the loops of your small intestine that fill up most of the space in your abdominal and pelvic cavity. You will notice in the picture below that the folds and loops of the small intestine look a lot like a brain. Our digestive tracts function to help us draw nutrients from the food we eat, but they are also deeply wired into our nervous systems and are part of how we experience thoughts and feelings. When we are anxious our intestines feel like they are churning in knots, when we are depressed, it can seem like nothing is moving inside and when we are excited, we might feel a bit like we have to poo; our emotions are reflected in our organs and our organs are directly wired to our brains.
The small intestine transitions into the large intestine in the lower right portion of the abdomen through a sphincter called the ileocecal valve. It is a common area of tension in people that have digestive challenges like gluten intolerance and Crohn’s disease. The first part of the large intestine is a bulbous structure called the cecum, and it sits just inside your right hip; it is also what your appendix is attached to. Tension and irritability in this area of your digestive tract can recurrently tighten up your right hip and possibly create a torsion force on your pelvis. The right ovary is in the same vicinity, and the nerves that turn into your sciatic nerve on that side pass just behind the abdominal organs. Emotional, physical and surgical forces in this area can be responsible for hip, back and right sided leg and foot dysfunction.
The large intestine, also known as the colon, frames the abdomen in a boxlike orientation. From the cecum, it travels up the right side, does a ninety degree turn under your lower ribcage, stretches across your upper abdomen, does another ninety degree turn downward and extends down your deep left side into the lower corner of your pelvis. The last part of your colon before it turns into your rectum passes right by your sciatica nerve and can be a contributing factor to persistent left sided hamstring, calf and foot pains. There is a lot of anatomy stuffed into your abdomen and pelvis that all needs to slide and move around in relation to the neighbouring structures, but again sometimes emotional, physiological and surgical forces can negatively influence our insides. Women’s ovaries rest close to the cecum on the right side and the sigmoid colon on the left side and can be the connection between a menstrual cycle affecting digestion in the lower abdomen and cramping lower back pain. Our systems are more connected that you realize, so don’t assume that all aches and pains are rooted in just muscles and joints.
You can learn more in my article Visceral Manipulation: An Integrated Part of Physiotherapy and in my new book Why We Hurt: Understanding How To Be Comfortable In Your Own Body available January 10th on Amazon and AudioBook platforms.
