Right In Front of Us

What if I told you that a new, whole-body system was discovered in 2018? Does that seem unlikely given how much we already know about human anatomy? What if I said it was visible to the human eye but had been disregarded as unimportant? And that the way doctors and scientists study things kept it hidden in plain sight? And that it’s actually really important?

Well, it’s all true. The interstitium, as it’s been named, is a connected network of fluid-filled spaces that exists between cells, tissues, and organs throughout the body. “The interstitium has the ability to communicate through the body across every scale, from the quantum electromagnetic level, all the way up to the cellular level,” Dr. Neil Theise, the lead scientist in the discovery, said. It’s pretty important. 

The interstitium is actually part of the fascial system which we already talk about at Pilates in Holland, and in fact have entire workshops devoted to. Theise, says, “Nomenclature is an issue: If you focus on the connective tissue, you call it ‘fascia’; if you focus on the fluid, it’s ‘interstitium.’ We have a lot of talking and work to do across disciplines to sort this out.”

Why was something that is visible to the eye and is seen throughout our entire body missed? A body-wide communication system that is closely related to the lymphatic system and is now being explored as part of how cancer might be spread or contained? As Thomas Myers, a leader in the world of fascia says, “As a context, it is an ‘environment’, and like most environments, is undetected until someone points it out.” 

When scientists and doctors first saw this tissue (way, way back), dead and “mummified” on slides under a microscope, they thought it was just a flat, solid wall. They couldn’t see the fluid-filled system in living tissue because the technology didn’t exist. The interstitium was discarded as unimportant. That incorrect information was taken as fact and taught in medical schools for decades without being questioned, until new tech, and new information, came along.

Theise noted that there may be quite a bit of information already known about the interstitium; it’s just that researchers “didn’t know what they were looking at.” Indeed, the researchers plan to conduct a review of the scientific literature “for all the things we know about this [body part] but didn’t know we knew.”

I learned about the interstitium on a Radiolab podcast a friend shared with me. The author also wrote a related article about all the interstitial things in the world that we take for granted. She writes, “Just as scientists can now see the interstitium everywhere they look, I see these people everywhere who are bridging, connecting and serving as conduits, keeping systems in communication, operable, healthy…Their impact transcends any one area, and has been essentially hidden from how we organize, track, measure and reward people in our economy and society.” They are a superhighway conduit of information, connecting and helping people in all areas to communicate better for the greater good.

Here’s the wackiest part to me: the information isn’t wholly new to traditional Chinese medicine. This “discovery” is more of a Western discovery and it is now opening channels of putting together information that has been siloed by different philosophies, disciplines, and ideologies. Besides completely overlooking what was right in front of us as unimportant, we (the world) aren’t talking enough to each other to learn what the others have to share. 

What else is so visible, it’s invisible? What other assumptions do we need to question? What do you know that others don’t? Who are the connectors in your world? What other questions need to be asked? What’s right in front of us that we’re missing?

Stay curious, everyone,