Theory HFM

1.The viewpoint of functionality

2.The notion of positionality

3.Brain functions and functions of movement

4.Research into biomecanical principles

Below is a brief outline of the four points presented in the introduction.

Functions of posture and movement are not explicable on account of joint and muscle functions, not even when the coherence between them is set out as a complex, interactive structure in which reactions, aided by various proprioceptive and exteroceptive reflexes, are induced by autonomous external stimuli. The danger in this case is that treatment might then be based on the mechanical ( morphological, orthopaedic, or purely physiological) components of the motor apparatus, even when there is no question of objective and demonstrable morphological deviations calling for disease-specific treatment.

The term motor apparatus is therefore a crippled term. Posture and movement are not the result of a working apparatus.

Posture and movement are forms of behaviour of animals and humans, which in the first instance are determined by the entire way of existence of that subject which moves itself.

The way in which that subject moves itself depends on the way it transforms its surroundings into a self-determined proper situation. By means of unconscious, bodily experiences corresponding initially with evolutionary selected likes and dislikes, the subject has discovered and attached particular values and importance to its own environment.

Consequently the way of existence of the moving subject corresponds to an entirely proper world view. It is from that particular, valued world view that posture and movement get their real determination and explanation. Posture and movement find their starting-point in the concrete significant relation with which a self-functioning individual enters into its own environment.

Posture reflexes and biomechanical tunings are important, but not as self-acting automatisms. They are(as Buytendijk calls them) "appliances" which may be used in a good or in a bad way, on the base of the topical significance-relation between the self-moving subject and its situation.

When biomechanical laws are broken and as a consequence of that complaints arise, the cause of those complaints is often not found in the (as result) badly functioning segments of motion, but in the manner the subject gives shape to its environment in a non-natural way. That doesn’t demand repairs of the ‘motor apparatus’, but it asks for repairs of the attitude of the subject towards its environment. Of course that wrong attitude may already have caused so much damage that that attitude is not to be repaired in a simple way.