The Hour on the Table

I got sick at 19. I didn't get real answers until I was 37.

For eighteen years I moved through the medical system getting told, in one form or another, that what I was feeling wasn't quite real, wasn't quite measurable, or wasn't quite their specialty. What I actually had was Crohn's disease hiding in an unusual location, and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome rearranging the whole picture underneath it. By the time someone finally put it together, I had spent most of my adult life being dismissed, misdiagnosed, or handed off.

That experience is the reason I do this work the way that I do.

What an hour actually buys you

A primary care visit is twelve minutes. A specialist appointment might be twenty. Almost nobody in modern medicine gets to see a patient for a full hour, uninterrupted, with their hands on the body and their attention completely on the person in front of them.

I do. Every session.

An hour on the table is sixty minutes of full-body, hands-on access. It is also sixty minutes during which a nervous system that has been bracing for years finally has room to settle. When that happens, something shifts in the conversation. People start telling me things they forgot to mention at their doctor's appointment. They remember the fall from five years ago. The surgery nobody asked about. The symptom that's been so constant they stopped noticing it.

And when you book a 60-minute session at Firm and Flourish, you actually get the full 60 minutes of hands-on work, not 45 minutes plus changing time. More on how I structure session time.

Underneath my hands, I'm doing something parallel: palpating tissue, feeling fluid move (or not move), noticing asymmetries, tracking the places the body is holding on to something. I have a lifetime of science-nerd observation skills preparing me for this. I apply all of it, every session, to one person at a time.

The catches

Some examples of what an hour can reveal.

While doing abdominal work on a patient, I noticed something that didn't feel right. It wasn't dramatic, just something that shouldn't have been there. I flagged it. She followed up with her physician. It turned out to be fibroid cysts nobody had known about.

It's happened with fertility patients more than once. Something in the history, or something that comes up in our conversation, prompts a question about testing or workup that nobody on the care team has thought to ask. Sometimes the answer has changed the direction of treatment.

More than once, I've written notes to physicians, with the patient's full permission, passing along what I was seeing in the tissue, or what had come up in our conversation that seemed relevant to their care. I don't think of that as overstepping. I think of it as finishing the job. If I notice something and don't get it into the hands of the person who can act on it, I haven't actually done my work.

A note to the physicians reading this

If you're a physician and you've landed here, I want to be clear about something: we're on the same team.

You have training and diagnostic authority I don't have. You also have, through no fault of your own, a schedule that makes it nearly impossible to sit with one person for a full hour and just listen with your hands. I have that hour. I'd rather feed what I notice back into the medical system than work around it. If your patient is seeing me and I catch something, I want to be a source of information for you, not a source of friction. The best outcomes I've been part of have happened because a patient's whole care team was actually talking to each other.

Why I do this

I consider a big part of what I do, for all of my patients, but especially for my chronic illness and fertility patients, is to help them advocate for themselves, as well as helping them understand symptoms and test results.

Lipedema is one example of a chronic condition women carry for years before anyone names it. More on lipedema and MLD.

I have extensive education in anatomy, physiology, and biology, and I'm very good at understanding medical systems. I can lend that particular power to my patients to help them navigate a difficult situation. I try to be present for others the way I've wanted someone to be there for me as a chronic illness patient. Since that didn't exist, I had to become that person. More on what that combination of gentle technique and real medical experience actually looks like in practice.

If you've been carrying something you haven't been able to name yet, and you're tired of being moved along before anyone has really listened, come. Bring all of it. We have an hour.

Morgan Larson, LMT, CMLDT

Owner, Firm and Flourish Lymphatic Therapies

Kinnelon, NJ | Serving Morris County