Mesentery
How the Health of Your Mesentery Affects Your Wellbeing
Understanding the Web That Connects Your Digestive Organs
Below is the chapter on Mesentery, taken from Dr. Sean Woods’ book, “The Healing Vibe.”
I chose to begin my discussion of the digestive process by starting with the mesentery because this organ surrounds each organ, keeps them separate from one another, and interconnects all of them together. It is a major interface between the digestive organs and every other part of the body.
The mesentery is the latest organ that has been identified by medical science in the last two years. Leonardo Da Vinci first wrote about it and drew it precisely in his illustrations in the 1400’s. Modern medicine has known about it, but only recently determined it was acting as a single functioning organ. It is one of the first places your food gets absorbed into and which I know is major source of problems being created in the body.
This organ is unique in that it is like a webbing that is interconnecting all the digestive organs in the abdomen and at the same time acting as a suspension network to hold the organs in place. This suspension connects the organs and glands together and then suspends them by attaching to the front of the spine, ribcage, diaphragm, quadratus lumborum, and psoas muscles. A very important fact is that the fascia of the mesentery is continuous with the fascia of the entire body. It provides another avenue for delivering nutrients to every aspect of the body and is the system where a large part of the acupuncture meridian system lives. This fact is important to remember as we go along building a picture of how the body is connected and on how disease manifests. The mesentery is the place where all the systems interconnect and start the distribution of certain aspects of the food you eat. This fascial network is a major highway used to rebuild your magnificent body.
The health of the mesentery is critical for you to experience well-being on many levels and it is for this reason that I spend time palpating and assessing the mesentery in the abdominal area in many of my patients. The tissue in the mesentery can be some of the worst tissue I feel in the body and comparative to the ‘feel’ of fibromyalgia in muscle tissue. There is a palpable distinction between food in the digestive organs and fibrotic, sticky mesenteric fascia. With any disease process, there is often a lot of unwanted waste that is trapped in the mesenteric fascia, this waste cannot get out, and is blatantly congesting the rest of the body. If the mesentery is congested, at some point you will begin to manifest dis-ease somewhere in the body. You cannot have congestion in critical distribution centers in the body and not be affected in some way physically, chemically, and emotionally. It is vibrationally impossible. Your digestive system is considered your second brain and when your mesentery starts gluing up and plaquing shut, you know that your brain is not far behind! Many, if not all, cases of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s have large portions of their mesentery glued shut.
Food that sits undigested in the digestive organs absorbs into the mesentery fascia and causes tissue stiffness and spasms in areas far reaching from its source. This creates imbalance to our physical structure and leads to major structural compensations. I have people come in with chronic pain in the neck and back and routinely find an underlying digestive issue tugging and pulling at their fascia and directly causing misalignments to their spine. Usually these problems have been investigated by numerous doctors and none of them had any idea that the two things were intimately connected, nor would have any idea on how to correct it.
The omentum is a part of this mesenteric system and the research done on this tissue is extensive and helps to prove the importance of keeping it clean and healthy. The momentum is an extension of the mesentery and it hangs down over the front of the organs like a thin veil. It is basically a storage facility for food (mostly fats) that have been digested, absorbed, and stored for later use. Most of the fat in the body should be stored under the skin and is generally not harmful and has many healthy attributes.
Visceral fat, the kind stored in the omentum and mesentery, is much more of a problem to the human body.
Fat stored in the mesentery and left there has been shown to cause cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, asthma, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and on and on. If this storage material were ‘good fats’ then there would be less of an issue. The problems occur when there are ‘bad’ fats combined with ‘bad’ proteins that create massive inflammatory and hormonal responses. There is NO drug on the planet that can get ahead of this problem! This is one area that is the toughest of all to get at and requires months of consistent work to get into these deep abdominal recesses.
Once partially digested food and toxins make it through the bowel wall and into the body proper (the mesentery), you have nothing but immune reactions. The science gets complicated quickly, but you will see the fix lies in simplicity. The body views these particles as foreign invaders and it is the immune system that gets the job of handling the attack. This process is one of the most common reasons for the inflammatory response that even the medical community is blaming for most, if not all, disease.
We will be talking a lot about the mesentery in relation to the other digestive organs/glands to help you see the significance of keeping this organ healthy. If you are looking down and wondering how you can get yours healthy then you will have to figure out how to get your bile healthy. The answer is increasing your daily intake of fruits and vegetables, learning how to use the correct supplementation to coordinate and clean the digestive organs, and taking your health seriously.