History of the SMT®

The manual technique of the SMT® is an old folk medicine. For ages human beings want to help others by very simple means. Beside the herbal lore there were surely used manual manipulations to help suffering people.

In the middle age in England they called healers, who worked manually on their patients, bonesetter. This expression exactly describes, what the SMT® does nowadays, it resets the bones and joints of the sick people.

Today I know that this treatment eliminates nervous incarcerations and irritations, leading consequently to a normalization of organic functions, which finally brings health or at least relief.

There are two reasons, why this knowledge did not make its entry in modern medicine. Hippocrat (he lived in the 4th century before Christ) did not accept the manual therapy, which at that time was, after his statement, quite common, because he regarded most of the therapists (probably no medical doctors) to be charlatans. Possibly one could impute Hippocrat (like classical medicine does also nowadays) self-interest, because he surely was interested, like classical medicine nowadays, to concentrate the healing business for the medical profession on economic grounds and eliminate disagreeable competitors.

That Hippocrat did not completely refuse the manual therapy, can be recognized by the fact, that he himself developed methods to adjust twisted limbs and crooked spines, because he knew or at least had already the idea that these damages cause other diseases.

He invented the impact technique, which came from the idea, that the most common reason for twisted limbs and crooked spines are accidents, and that a crooked spine thus can be healed in the same way it had come into being. For that the patients were tied on a ladder and let them, with their feet forward, fall down from the roof of their house, which at that time mostly was one-storeyed. Following the simple motto: "Like it came, it should go again"

Secondly he created the "sling table", where the patient, lying on his belly, was tied on a bench, and assistents of the therapist were pulling at his feet (extension therapy). At the same time the doctor climbed on the back of the patient and stepped with his feet carefully on those parts of the spine, which had to be treated and so tried to rearrange the damages.

Unfortunately, and to the harm of the patients, this principle of stretching and extending was never questioned by the medical science, since centuries, even thousands of years. The cognitions and publications of Hippocrat and his students were up to the 18th and partly even 19th century an undisputed authority in the, from the depth of the medieval world emerging developing medical science.

In Europe a further circumstance appeared, originated in the doctrines of the catholic church. It was forbidden to ease human suffering and pain. Because by bearing such sufferings human beings came closer to god, who was suffering and dying for them at the cross. During the time of the inquisition all people, who wanted and could help others to be healed, were pursued and mostly ended on the stake.

It was not before 1957, after the question of a reputed Italian professor during a medical congress, whether now finally narcosis and pain therapy not runs counter any more to the church doctrine, the pope, and therewith the catholic church, allowed to spare suffering people pain by using narcosis and so obtain a therapeutical relief.

Nevertheles fragments of this old folk medicine survived, then often being connected to obscure imaginations, which can not be maintained nowadays. Nevertheless this folk medicine, which preferably could keep on existing in the country, contains important and absolute correct knowledges, which nowadays are fragmentarily rediscovered by the classical medicine and recognized as quite practicable and right.

Especially in the country in the Bavarian Allgäu there were and still are nowadays a big number of so-called healers. These people not only are pure esoterics, but also persons who try to help sick people by means of most different manual techniques.

The basics of the SMT® Dr. Graulich has learned from such a healer living in the Allgäu, a medical layman.

This healer already referred to the Chinese acupuncture and especially to the meridian science, by saying that preferably those vertebrae block, whose meridian is disturbed by a subluxated joint. After having found the book "acupuncture" (published by the Bauer company, unfortunately out of print), of a Mr. Cerney, describing the connections between vertebrae and organs, he recognized the importance of these knowledges and integrated it in his manual treatment. For example, he explained to Dr. Graulich already at the beginning, that very often the so-called MS patients (multiple sclerosis - link! ) had a blockade at the 5th thoracal vertebra, the liver vertebra. Today, after years of working with the SMT, Dr. Graulich can just confirm the correctness of and the reference to the knowledges of the acupuncture science, especially the meridian science; he even can explain and justify it.

By means of these qualifications, Dr. Graulich dealt for years with the SMT® in his medical practice in theory and practice and developed it further in the course of time, in the theoretic recognitions as well as in the technique of the manual treatment. Dr. Graulich had modified the handling of the SMT® in such a way, that everybody with the necessary interest and normal skill is able to raise a safe finding and consequently remove it.

Although, if the SMT® in its present condition, further developed by Dr. Graulich, shall become a medical folk medicine, where within the family one has to take care that no damages at spine or joints can arise, and people are put into the state to correct small damages themselves, nevertheles this therapy has to remain in the hands of doctors, physiotherapists, masseurs and others. Beside this the sport physiology and -medicine must eliminate the motion patterns, which lead to damages at joints of the legs and the pelvis and replace it by senseful, not damaging exercise treatments.

Although the treatment by means of the SMT®, and this is the greatest advantage of this therapy, cannot cause any damage (you even can treat, if you act carefully, pregnant and osteoporosis patients), only experienced therapists should be allowed to treat such patients.

SMT® surely has not yet reached its final development. Many of the very complex connections, which just had been brought up roughly, surely still need exact exploration and further development.