Adhesions, Lymphedema, and More

I’m back on the old YouTube and have an update about what I’ve been up to. For future I have a bunch of interviews, literature reviews, and more lined up!

And quick reminder … I’m so excited for those who have already registered for the upcoming class series. If you haven’t yet, here’s the link again:

Transcript of Video:

Hey everybody! It is wild to think it’s been, I think eight years, no, six years since I’ve done anything on YouTube. So, I’m back!

Things have settled a little bit since the pandemic, since nursing, since learning amazing new skills that have completely, I won’t say revolutionized, but they have certainly deeply informed how I’m moving forward and continuing to do my work with abdominal adhesions. And everything that I’ve been up to has, I think, really served me being able to work with abdominal adhesions in an effective, safe way even more.

Since the last time I was here I started a clinic specifically for adhesions and lymphedema. There’s a huge amount of overlap there and I didn’t realize that lymphedema, to some degree, is what I was seeing in a huge amount of my abdominal adhesion clients – particularly those who have had surgery in their low abdomens, in the pelvic region: prostate surgery, c-sections, hysterectomies, even occasionally appendectomies (seem to not be as problematic for people) but certainly I have share of appendectomy post-surgical clients over the years. Hernias, of course.

But in any case, many people have had multiple of those surgeries over years sometimes in quick succession sometimes with years or even decades in between.

But the more surgery in that low abdomen the higher the risk of chronic swelling otherwise known as lymphedema.

And I’m still here teaching up a storm. I have a new series coming up that I’m super excited about. It starts mid-February. It’s a series of three, two-hour classes. It is starting to fill up! 

But anyway, so yes this is a huge piece of what I have now incorporated into my work as working with abdominal adhesions. And of course, the huge amount of wound care that I’ve done over the last couple three years as a nurse has also really supercharged how I’m thinking about scars and how to work with people who are in these post-surgical conditions. So, it’s been a massive learning process and getting up to speed in all of the clinical practice and the research.

I have applied for and should know in a couple months whether I got in for a PhD, a nursing PhD program at OHSU Oregon Health and Sciences University here in Portland. Because I feel so much energy around continuing to work with abdominal adhesions with improved practices from the day of surgery and beyond. As many of you have experienced, your adhesions maybe don’t cause any sort of symptoms that really bum you out for sometimes years sometimes even decades. And those symptoms can be really subclinical – you don’t even think to mention them to your doctor maybe for a long time before they sort of explode into a small bowel obstruction or a much more intense pain than you’ve ever experienced before. And then instead of kind of coming and going suddenly it’s with you increasingly and consistently.

And so, I really, really want to be getting ahead of this. And I think being able to consistently do research into it is one of the ways that clinical research is one of the ways that I can help potentially. So, we’ll see if I get into that program.

But just real quick, just to kind of give you a show and tell of what I’ve been up to.

This is my new clinic, Surgery Recovery Clinic, here in Portland, Oregon. You can see I took some pictures in the summer. My reserved parking space is very exciting. And I’ve been posting pictures of the clinic on Instagram and Facebook. So if you want to check me out there on Facebook or on Instagram. And I, of course, I’m still over here at abdominaladhesiontreatment.com kind of working on a rebranding here. Healmybelly.com is a secondary URL that I’ve had for a really long time. It’s shorter it’s sweeter. And I’ve just been getting a lot of feedback from people that it kind of feels more like a hug than the very clinical abdominal adhesion treatment dot com.So I’m working on this rebranding. I don’t know how sold I am on it. You can see like in certain areas of the website I haven’t fully made the switch. It’s a little back and forth but it’s all still me. I’m still here doing the thing!  

So, I already talked a little bit about the lymphedema training that I did, but I brought this up. These were the folks that I trained with (International Lymphedema & Wound Training Institute), and I just cannot say enough about it. So, if you are a clinician and you want to improve your skills around lymphedema, wound care, chronic swelling, whether or not you’re thinking of it as wound care, this is a fabulous resource.

So, a lot of clinicians who’ve done wound care we know a lot about or have heard a lot about chronic venous insufficiency. And historically, most of the swelling tends, especially in the lower limbs and the legs tends to get ascribed to CVI. And we are all learning that there is not a hard and fast distinction between, chronic venous insufficiency and lymphedema. In fact, phlebolymphedema, even if the lymph nodes and the lymph system is working full bore doing its thing, anytime it gets overloaded we end up with lymphedema because we end up with swelling in the tissues.

I just feel like this training supercharged my knowledge and my clinical skills to such a degree. I could not have opened my clinic without doing this training and feel at all confident that I have any sense of what I’m really doing. And I am just so impressed by how much of it translated into how I approach abdominal adhesions.

So, for those of you who have been following me a while, I’ve been doing the abdominal adhesion work and teaching it for a really long time since 2009. So, you know, like, 17 years at this point and fundamentally, my work remains the same. I’m still really committed to the soft tissue releases. I just don’t know how else you can get those tissues to start slipping and sliding over each other. And I think there’s a whole bunch else that we can learn and talk about incorporating into home care, incorporating into daily life, and incorporating from the lymphedema world in terms of some of the forms of compression that get used on the limbs and sometimes on the trunk. But really getting more targeted and really getting more effective at knowing when that’s going to help and really helping everybody with abdominal adhesions recover more quickly and more happily. 

Because the last thing anybody wants, the last thing anybody wants is a bowel obstruction, right, because of adhesions, is to be in pain day after day, to not be able to socialize because you don’t know if you’re going to be able to sit up for enough of a period of time. At the extreme end of adhesions, it can be so limiting to living your life.

And even in sort of like the lower and middle end of the continuum with adhesions, it’s just so impactful. It changes urination, it changes bowel movements, not always all of it at once, you know, but it really does change function like movement function especially.

I see a lot of people who are really active and the adhesions can really kind of stop you from making progress. Like, especially for those who are really into lifting weights and sort of building a lot of muscular bulk and things like that and, and not for the sake of bulking out. But, you know, I have a lot of really active clients who love things like CrossFit, who are avid outdoors people, who are martial artists, tons of martial artists. And you don’t want adhesions to interrupt your life and your activity. Lots of runners, right?

So, I just am feeling really enthusiastic about continuing to carry this work forward and not in the sort of not just with the skills that I’ve always had but continuing to build and grow and hopefully be able to do some real research into this and make it more.

The reason I’m so interested in being able to do research is because as a clinician, I know this work helps. We can work with abdominal adhesions. Well, and to take a step back even further from that, I know they’re real and I know that they have a real impact.

And I think the longer that I’ve worked as a nurse in sort of this allopathic care model where you have to go to your PCP, your primary care physician for everything to get the referral to the next person. And even if you’re on something like Medicare, where you can just, just go to specialists, with straight Medicare, things like that, you can just choose your specialists and go to them. A lot of times there’s just so little understanding of what swelling can really mean or in our case what abdominal adhesions can really mean.

I got a call from somebody the other just, I think a week and a half ago and. And her provider, her primary care provider, doesn’t believe that abdominal adhesions are real. She doesn’t think they’re a thing. The provider said that she’s had multiple patients with multiple surgeries in their abdomens and they don’t have adhesions and she just doesn’t think they’re real. And there is already a ton of research to say that’s actually not true.

There’s a ton of research and you can see it on my clinic website research page. So these are all of the peer reviewed, non-retracted, studies, peer reviewed studies about, and clinical trials and things like that, meta-analyses, all of it about abdominal adhesions and lymphedema. And so we know that they’re real. And I really want to push on getting this into primary care practice, that adhesions are real and that they can be worked with and that there’s a lot that we can do to help people get back into living life in the way that they want to be living life.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. That’s what I’m doing. I guess this turned into a little bit of just kind of like an update. Going forward on my YouTube channel, as previously, I’m starting to line up interviews with other practitioners, really high-quality practitioners who work either in the abdominal adhesion realm or really close to it.

So, for example, pelvic health PTs, physical therapists – internal pelvic care, it can be really, really helpful for a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. And I think we can learn more about that.

I’m going to be, I am reaching out currently to,  nutritionists who are functional nutritionists because this is still, if you listen to me talk 10 years ago and you listen to me talk now, this is still one of the areas that I get the questions about is how do I know what I can eat? What is going to be supportive to NOT having another bowel obstruction? How do I figure out the nutrition side of it? And that is, it remains one of the areas that I just, because I’m not a nutritionist or a dietitian, I don’t have that training and quite frankly I’m not going to have that training. I have too much else that I’m focusing on. And so I really want to do a better job of wrapping in people, people who do have tons of experience and do research, evidence  based practice around helping,  people figure out how to maximize what they’re eating for their comfort and for helping to  make sure that we’re not creating more inflammation and irritation in the gut because that can set us up for bowel obstructions. So that in particular. But also, I think there are, other than bowel obstructions, there are a lot of things that happen with abdominal adhesions that disrupt the gut.

And so just having more resources for all of you around nutrition is going to be one of the biggest pushes that I make over the next several months because I really want you to have more access to really high-quality information for that. So look, for those interviews here on YouTube, and they’ll also be posted on my site.

I will continue to keep the comments on YouTube shut down but you can comment on my website. You’re always welcome to comment there. I just don’t have the bandwidth to moderate multiple comment threads and on YouTube stuff gets nasty real fast and I just can’t. So I’m always open to your comments, to your feedback. I want you as much as possible talking to each other also, so you can still do that on the blog.

So, I think that pretty much covers it. That’s where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been learning, kind of where I’m going and what you can expect to see coming up here on ye olde YouTube going forward. It’s good to be back. I feel a lot of energy around it, which is kind of what I’ve been waiting for. It’s really hard to do things when it feels like a slog, but right now I just feel like I have stuff just pouring out of me that I want to share. So, yay, let’s see where it goes. All right, I’ll see you all next time.

Author Profile

Isabel Spradlin

Isabel Spradlin is a Registered Nurse (RN), Licensed Massage Therapist (LMT), and CLWT abdominal adhesion specialist in Portland, OR. She specializes in educating people about manual treatment (massage) for abdominal pain and dysfunction, especially when it is adhesion related. Please see the "Programs" page to see her offerings.

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