Tomsterdam - a touch of technique

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center reports that the Alexander Technique improved the surgical posture and technical performance of urological surgeons:

For their study with urological surgeons, the researchers studied four urology fellows and three urology residents from the medical center. After training in the Alexander Technique, the subjects demonstrated improved abilities to complete laparoscopic skills in a shorter time. The subjects showed improvements in posture, trunk and shoulder stability and the ability to perform the series of laparoscopic skills tests.

“The Alexander Technique training program resulted in significant improvement in posture and trunk and shoulder endurance,” the researchers state in their presentation. “Improved endurance and posture during surgery reduces the occurrence of surgical fatigue. Intra-operative fatigue has been shown to be associated with surgical errors. AT training has the potential to reduce the occurrence of fatigue-related surgical errors.”

Since the earliest days of the Alexander Technique, teachers and students have known from their own experiences that back pain responds very well to private lessons in the Technique. Constant back pain was in fact one of the main reasons I myself began taking lessons. The relief of that pain was the main reason I continued lessons, and why I decided to become a teacher. Yet in all these years of anecdotes, the hard evidence to prove this claim was nowhere to be found.

All that changed yesterday with the publication in the British Medical Journal of “Randomised controlled trial of Alexander technique lessons, exercise, and massage (ATEAM) for chronic and recurrent back pain“. This 5-year study of 579 patients revealed what AT teachers have suspected all along: Alexander Technique is more effective in relieving back pain than massage or exercise, the current standard medical treatments.

A series of 24 lessons in the Alexander technique taught by registered teachers provides long term benefits for patients with chronic or recurrent low back pain. Both six lessons in the Alexander technique and general practitioner prescription for aerobic exercise with structured behavioural counselling by a practice nurse were helpful in the long term; classic massage provided short term benefit. Six lessons in the Alexander technique followed by exercise prescription was almost as effective as 24 lessons.

Today’s Business Standard has a short article in the Fitness section about Alexander Technique. Although it talks in only very general terms, its imprecise wording makes me think that the author has not actually experienced lessons. A dead give-away is the reference to AT “therapists”:

An AT therapist starts by observing basic movements like sitting, standing and lying down, to understand where the inefficiencies manifest. Then, by words and gentle touching, the therapist shows where the tension is, and how to release it (called “rising” or “lifting”). For minor problems, in 6 to ten sessions you can learn how to use AT yourself.

Being called an AT therapist makes me groan. And I have never, in 25 years of Alexander Technique experience, heard any teacher refer to releasing tension as either “rising” or “lifting”.