Illustrations

I chose the word “a priori” because I needed a word to justify my experience and a reference to my experience as a physical therapist testing for passive adduction ability. This word reflects issues concerning the proposition or claim that if your pelvis is in an anteriorly rotated state and you line the femur up with the body in a position that we often call the Ober’s Test you can justify the fact that the leg can’t adduct because of the osseous impingement components of the state the acetabulum is in. A priori is an argument that says you can see that it’s true just by laying a person on their side and you don’t have to necessarily rely on previous research or science because the a priori knowledge or justification is independent of my experience. It’s a word that is used as an adjective to modify the noun knowledge. It’s an adjective that can also modify other nouns such as truth. The word a priori is Latin and means “from what comes before”. In this case the activity that came before femur restriction in this position was acetabular orientation. My favorite description of this word comes from Wikipedia: “Proponents of this explanation, a priori, claim to reduce dubious metaphysical faculty of pure reason to a legitimate linguistic notion of analyticity.” Basically what it means is that I am using a word to describe a priori algorithm of a class of algorithms for learning association rules as they relate to femoral acetabular adduction when an individual is not first placed into a neutral position. If you had prior knowledge of the position the acetabulum is in when it’s in an anteriorly forwardly rotated or oriented state then you know that the position or the placement of the femur that you often see being carried out by testers by using over testing methodology, will result in a limited amount of adduction because of osseous orientation and impingement. So there is a known or assumed cause to a related effect that is objective. It’s a deductive word that is based on theory rather than experiment because of the argument that can be made prior to the experimentation. Again, this is one of my favorite Latin words and it reflects a lot of what I philosophically believe in and allows me to be open minded but yet be philosophically grounded. Our Institute is founded on the way you use knowledge and this word best describes the foundation of PRI.

The title of this artistic illustration reflects how our two lateralized hemi-rib cages operate when their top column of ribs move away from the central axis, or the spine. Bifarious is a botanical name for a structure that has parts arranged in two rows on either side of a central axis. The Latin definition of ‘bifarious’ is ‘double’. These two representations of the anterior chest wall help clarify the likely degree of lateral flexion or thoracic wall abduction of each row of ribs, with respect to the lung, organ and neurologic asymmetry guidance. It reminds the viewer that they are not looking at one rib cage when you look at the chest or thorax. They are seeing double. Two chest walls that revolve and rotate around a central axis, making all our chest walls bifariously oriented.

This word was selected for this illustration because of the position that the temporal bones are in on the human cranium.  The temporomandibular fossa moves anterior laterally with temporal internal rotation on the right side which is what this illustration depicts.  This entraps the condyle and usually positions the condyle posteriorly on that side and produces a movement or positioning of the mandible to the left with underutilization of the left lateral pterygoid.  The retruded left mandible occurs because of temporal external rotation on the left.  The fossa moves posteriorly and medially when this happens and usually results in compression of the temporomandibular joint disc between the anterior lateral temporal fossa and the anterior mandibular condyle and that’s when you often see anterior disc displacements occurring on the left side.  Again, the reason “deprived” was chosen is because the left temporal bone usually is deprived of temporal internal rotation and the right one is deprived of temporal external rotation resulting in sidebending lesions of the cranium and rotational constraint through the temporomandibular joints.  This deprivation usually coincides and often precedes most TMJ dysfunctional patterns and pain.

This word is derived from the Latin word “loqui” which means “to speak”. The tensor fascia latae is a muscle that is speaking loudly to us when patients with anterior knee pain, hip bursitis, SI joint strain, etc, come into the clinic and point to this overdeveloped muscle on the left side. It contributes to the forward inclination or anterior position of the left innominate. It has a very big impact on shifting the center of gravity to the right side and it often is considered a substitute muscle for gluteus medius abduction or gluteus medius type of activity when the gluteus medius and minimus on the left side are not in their correct position to properly support the body when the right leg is going through phases of swing through or push off. This muscle is a very important internal rotator of the femur on the acetabulum because its position often reduces good ability for acetabular internal rotation on the femur, especially at midstance. You see this overdeveloped and overused muscle on runners and individuals who stand and sit for long periods of time. Therefore, I chose the word because it’s very active, talkative, loud, and palpable and it vibrates a message to me every time I see someone come in with low back pain or difficulty with frontal plane movement.