Episode 17: Interview Dr. Rebecca Pratt, Anatomy Professor on what is fascia, embryology, neural crest cells and more.
Description
In Episode 17, I am interviewing Dr. Rebecca Pratt, professor of anatomy located in Rochester, Michigan and president of the Fascia Research Society. Dr. Pratt is a gross anatomist who has been training medical students and has worked training American osteopaths over the last 23 years. Dr. Pratt is also editor of the Journal of Bodywork and Movement by Elsevier, which is a pivotal journal for research in the fields of fascia and manual therapies. She is about to make some big changes in her career pathway, which I am excited about, and we discuss in the interview. In this interview I ask Rebecca “How you came to work with “fascia”? What is important for us to know about fascia from a gross anatomy perspective?” and we then discuss “I would love to deep dive into around how fascia is formed in embryology and how that may shift our perspective in how we understand what we see in the experience of dissection (I do have my own thoughts on this).”
Furthermore, the Fascial Research Congress is happening in New Orleans August 10-14 and Rebecca, and I will be presenting as well as many others. To learn more, go to https://www.frscongress.org/.
Finally, regardless of what hat you wear when you work in the field of fascia it is important to understand we are still learning about the mysteries of fascia and how to define it within our fields. Dr. Pratt co-authored with many other leaders from Carla Stecco, Robert Schleip and more and abstract entitled Towards a comprehensive definition of the human fascial system (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39814456/). The abstract begins with “The absence of a clear consensus on the definition and significance of fascia and the indiscriminate use of the term throughout the clinical and scientific literature has led to skepticism regarding its importance in the human body.”
United States
