One of the concepts that DNS uses in assessing and treating movement or activation dysfunction is called “punctum fixum.” I may or may not have mentioned it in the three-part series on DNS I posted over the past week, but it’s summed up nicely in this quote from Jeff Cubos’ blog:

The “Punctum Fixum” as taught within DNS by the Prague School are the specific areas where movement begins. They are places in the body that act as stable bases for movement. The direction of muscle pull, in general, project toward these regions and the choices of support zones that our body makes depend on the initial position of that body.

These are also the “special points” that DNS creator Pavel Kolar holds during his manual therapy on the patient in this video (see 15:47, this full sequence begins at 14:00).

Charlie Weingroff had this to say about the “punctum fixum” concept:

Kolar’s integration of Vaclav’s work is through Reflex Stimulation. As babies transition to milestones, they require a “point of stability,” almost something to push off of to change position. For those that have little ones at home, they will see that this point of stability is bone. This force into bone causes morphological changes in the bone changing its orientation. For instance certain angles of the ribs that are posteriorly oriented in adults and anterior in infants. There is almost no femoral neck in babies. Poor development potentially causes anteversion or retroversion. Vaclav’s hypothesis was that it is this stimulation of bony changes that was the automatic starter for movement transitions. And in normal babies, there is always a standard for what “good” movement looks like.

I’ve long wondered whether or not trigger points in muscles could be nexuses of stress from (dysfunctional) muscular actions. What I mean by that is that a trigger point is a place where lines of pull from various muscle groups (from above or below) converge on a single spot.

In dysfunctional movement, those patterns are over-used, and the points harden into spasming bundles. Hence the referring pain when you press on them, and the “global” release when they are manually released.

But the other ramification of this view is that trigger points represent dysfunctional movement…not dysfunctional muscle. So the full treatment of a trigger point involves movement re-education.

I haven’t had any experience with the advanced levels of punctum fixum in the DNS model, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has on the possible connections between these concepts.