A little over a year ago, I shared a blog about the interstitium, a newly recognized, body-wide network of fluid-filled spaces located between tissues and organs that acts as a “shock absorber,” transport system, and potential communication network. I reference it constantly—with new acquaintances, even in conversation with my soon-to-be boss for a new job in a position that had never existed before. I told her, “I see my role a lot like the interstitium. Read this blog I wrote about it.” I made my whole family listen to the podcast I referenced in the blog.
Why has it struck such a chord with me? I think it’s because the interstitium, a crucial body-wide network that cushions organs, moves nutrients, removes waste, and plays a role in immunity, was completely overlooked for hundreds of years. This “discovery” challenges our assumptions about what we think we know. It was seen, just not understood, and discarded as unimportant. It sometimes feels like I (like many moms) am the interstitium in our family ;) I plan the meals and buy the groceries, do the laundry, make sure the soccer cleats still fit, and do a million more unseen tasks. But if I stop, everything else comes crashing to a halt, too.
I also find it fascinating that its discovery is now beginning to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern medicine. I started seeing an acupuncturist last year, experiencing firsthand how Eastern medicine works with systems that Western medicine is only beginning to understand. I initially started going for some hip pain, which it helped with, but it also helped with frozen shoulder, constipation, relaxation, and overall better well-being. In my research for that blog, I came across a quote I didn’t end up using. The main researcher of the interstitium, pathologist Dr. Neil Theise, spoke at a conference in China about his “discovery.” Afterward, an expert in traditional Chinese medicine caught up to him and said, “We’ve been talking about it for 4000 years.”
I was reminded of this when I read that very quote yesterday in a NYT interactive article about the interstitium that my husband shared with our kids and me because apparently I can’t shut up about it. 😉 (Here’s a non-interactive version of that NYT article. I highly recommend reading one!)
So here it is again. I hope you learn something about your body and the assumptions we make. And I hope all you “interstitiums” out there recognize how important you are. I see you, and you make a world of difference.
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 told you it was visible to the naked eye — but had been dismissed as unimportant? That the very way scientists study the body kept it hidden in plain sight? And that it turns out to be genuinely significant?
Well, it’s all true. The interstitium, as it’s been named, is a connected network of fluid-filled spaces woven 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,” said Dr. Neil Theise, the lead scientist behind the discovery. Pretty important, indeed.
The interstitium is actually part of the fascial system — something we already talk about at Pilates in Holland, and have even dedicated entire workshops to. As Theise puts it, “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.”
So how did something visible throughout the entire body go unnoticed for so long — especially a body-wide communication system closely related to the lymphatic system, now being explored in relation to how cancer may spread or be contained? Thomas Myers, a leading voice in the world of fascia, offers a tidy answer: “Like most environments, it is undetected until someone points it out.”
When scientists first encountered this tissue — way, way back — it appeared dead and flattened on microscope slides, looking like nothing more than a solid wall. The technology to observe it in living tissue simply didn’t exist yet. So the interstitium was written off as unimportant, and that assumption was taught in medical schools for decades, unquestioned, until new tools and fresh eyes finally came along.
Theise noted that researchers may have actually known quite a bit about the interstitium all along — they just didn’t know what they were looking at. His team plans to comb through existing scientific literature for everything that was already known about this structure without anyone realizing it.
I first learned about the interstitium through a Radiolab podcast a friend shared with me. The podcast’s author also wrote a related article about all the interstitial things in the world we take for granted. She writes: “Just as scientists can now see the interstitium everywhere they look, I see 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 the superhighway connectors — the ones quietly keeping everything talking to everything else.
And here’s perhaps the wildest part: none of this is entirely new. The concept isn’t foreign to traditional Chinese medicine at all. This is really a Western discovery — and it’s now cracking open long-siloed conversations between different philosophies, disciplines, and traditions. The problem wasn’t just that we overlooked something hiding in plain sight. It’s that we weren’t talking to each other enough to learn what the other already knew.
What else is so visible it’s invisible? What other assumptions are we walking around with that no one has stopped to question? Who are the connectors in your world? What’s right in front of us that we’re still missing?
Stay curious, everyone,
