The Connective IssueThe Fascia Institute & Treatment Center Journal
A weekly report from the line of scrimmage of fascia medicine — where grit, recovery, and getting back in the game meet.
We didn’t just read the research. I’m a co-author on it.
Every week in this newsletter I tell you what the science says. This week my name is on it — I am a co-author of a new peer-reviewed review in Current Nutrition Reports, written with a team at Tulane.
The subject is one our patients ask about constantly: folate, methylation, and the brain. The senior author is Dr. Gregory Bix — Professor of Neurosurgery and Neurology at Tulane, Director of its Clinical Neuroscience Research Center — and getting to work alongside a stroke and neuroscience group of that caliber is exactly the kind of collaboration this institute was built to do. If you carry an MTHFR variant, if someone in your family is facing a neurodegenerative diagnosis, or if you’ve ever wondered why a B-vitamin keeps coming up in conversations about memory, this one is for you. It’s our cover story.
Then something I want you to actually act on, not just read: OxeFit assessments are free for the entire month of September — in New Orleans and in Beverly Hills. This is the single best way to find out what your body is actually doing, and for one month it costs you nothing.
After that, a mailbag question that cuts to the heart of why this newsletter exists — why doesn’t anyone know about fascia? — and an honest answer about how medicine managed to overlook a whole tissue. On special teams, the question I get asked after every PEMF session: should you buy one for home? And a warm welcome to Sofia Murillo, our new Patient Concierge.
Protect the quarterback. Everything else on the field depends on it. Let’s kick off.
In This Issue
- Folate & Brain Health: Dr. Courseault Co-Authors New Paper Highlight Reel
- OxeFit Is Free All September Free Kick
- Why Doesn’t Anyone Know About Fascia? Mailbag
- PEMF at Home: Is It Worth It? Special Teams
- Team Spotlight: Sofia Murillo MVP
- Know Your Numbers Two-Minute Drill
Protecting the quarterback.
Dr. Jacques Courseault is a co-author of a new peer-reviewed review on how one vitamin’s chemistry shapes the aging brain — eight authors, two institutions, one question.
On any field, the quarterback is the position you protect first — because everything else stops working the moment he goes down. Your brain is that position. And it turns out one of the most important protection schemes it has runs on a B vitamin most people never think about after prenatal care.
Role of Folate Metabolism in Neurodegenerative Diseases: Insight from Experimental and Clinical Studies
Meenakshi Umar · Karson Franjieh · Amanda Louise White · Elisse Ward-Dones · Saifudeen Ismael · Rose C. Roskey · Jacques Courseault · Gregory Jaye Bix
Current Nutrition Reports · Volume 15, Article 40 · 2026
Co-Author Jacques Courseault, MD — CEO and Medical Director, The Fascia Institute & Treatment Center
Here’s the short version of why folate matters far beyond pregnancy. Folate is the engine of something called one-carbon metabolism — the body’s system for moving small chemical tags called methyl groups from one place to another. That sounds abstract until you see what those tags do. That one-carbon chemistry is how your cells build and repair DNA, and methylation is how they switch genes on and off, manufacture neurotransmitters, and maintain the fatty sheaths that insulate nerve fibers. It is, quite literally, cellular housekeeping — and the brain is one of the most demanding customers it has.
When that system runs poorly, a byproduct called homocysteine builds up in the blood instead of being recycled. Elevated homocysteine has been linked in long-running population studies to faster brain shrinkage, steeper cognitive decline, and higher dementia risk. Folate, along with vitamins B12 and B6, is what clears it. The review pulls together the experimental and clinical evidence on how disruptions in folate metabolism show up across neurodegenerative disease — and where the science suggests intervention might actually help.
Why a fascia clinic is studying a B vitamin
Fair question, and the answer comes from our own exam rooms. The best-known genetic variant that slows this pathway down — MTHFR — comes up constantly in the hypermobility and connective-tissue population we treat. Patients arrive having read something alarming online, holding a genetic test they don’t know how to interpret, asking whether it explains their fatigue, their brain fog, their family history. We got tired of not having a rigorous answer. So we went and did the work.
The honest state of the evidence, which the review reflects: this is a real and important pathway, but supplementation is not a magic bullet for everyone. The signal is strongest in people who actually have a measurable problem — low folate, low B12, elevated homocysteine. That is an argument for testing before treating, not for everyone rushing out to buy a bottle of something.
And I want to name the people who built it, because a review like this is not a solo act. Eight authors — Meenakshi Umar, Karson Franjieh, Amanda Louise White, Elisse Ward-Dones, Saifudeen Ismael, Rose C. Roskey, myself, and senior author Gregory Bix — spent months pulling a scattered literature into one place. That’s the part that doesn’t show up in a citation: the arguing over what the evidence actually supports, the drafts, the reviewers pushing back.
I’ll be honest about how proud I am to have my name on this one, and prouder still of the company it’s in. Contributing to the peer-reviewed literature is how a clinic earns the right to make claims — and partnering with a research group like Tulane’s is how we intend to keep doing it.
Educational information only, not medical advice. Do not start, stop, or change any vitamin or medication based on this article. Testing and supplementation decisions should be made with your own physician, who can interpret your results in the context of your full history.
Find out what your body is actually doing.
For the entire month of September, OxeFit assessments are free at both of our locations. No cost, no catch — we just want you to have the data.
Most people have no objective idea how their body is performing. You know whether something hurts. You don’t know whether your left side is quietly doing sixty percent of the work, whether your force production has dropped since last year, or where the compensation pattern that’s about to become an injury is hiding.
OxeFit gives you that in numbers. It measures how you actually produce and absorb force — strength, balance, symmetry between sides, movement quality — and turns it into a baseline you can act on and re-check later. It’s the difference between “my knee feels weird” and knowing exactly which side is under-loading and by how much.
- Athletes and weekend warriors — know your asymmetries before the season finds them for you.
- Anyone coming back from injury — objective proof of where recovery actually stands, not just how it feels.
- Hypermobility and connective-tissue patients — a stability and control baseline that’s notoriously hard to capture any other way.
- Anyone over 40 — the earliest strength and balance changes are the ones worth catching.
Pick your city and get on the September calendar. Spots are first come, first served — and a free month tends to fill.
New Orleans
FIT Therapeutics
Bookings handled by our new Patient Concierge, Sofia Murillo.
Book in New Orleans →Beverly Hills
The Fascia Institute Los Angeles
Same offer, same month, on the West Coast.
Book in Beverly Hills →Complimentary OxeFit assessments available September 1–30, 2026, by appointment, subject to availability. An assessment is not a diagnosis and does not replace a clinical evaluation.
Why doesn’t anyone know about fascia?
“Why doesn’t anyone know about fascia?”
— From a reader
Because for most of medical history, we threw it away.
I mean that literally. Walk into any gross anatomy lab and watch a first-year medical student make their first cut. The first thing they meet under the skin is fascia — and the first thing they’re told to do is get rid of it. Scrape it off. Clean it away. It’s in the way of the “real” anatomy: the named muscles, the nerves, the vessels, the organs you’ll be quizzed on. Fascia was packing material. Stuffing. The white stuff you clear so you can see something important.
So an entire generation of physicians — mine included — learned the human body by first removing the one tissue that connects all of it.
There’s a second problem, and it’s technical. Nearly all of that dissection happens on embalmed cadavers, and preservative does something cruel to fascia. In life it’s translucent, wet, gliding, elastic. Fixed in formalin it turns stiff, opaque, and glued to everything around it. Even if you wanted to study it, the specimen in front of you had already lost the property that matters most — that it moves. You cannot learn what a tissue does for a living by looking at it dead and starched.
Add to that the quiet shrinking of anatomy itself. American medical schools taught roughly 550 hours of anatomy in 1901 and about 330 by the mid-1950s; today the whole course is often compressed into a single semester. When you’re cutting the anatomy budget that hard, you don’t spend the remaining hours on the tissue everyone had already agreed was irrelevant.
The turn came more recently than most people realize. In October 2007, the first International Fascia Research Congress met at the Harvard Medical School Conference Center — roughly a thousand clinicians and scientists in one room, arguing about connective tissue. Two things happened there. A French surgeon named Jean-Claude Guimberteau showed endoscopic video of fascia alive, inside a living person, sliding and reorganizing in real time — the first time most people in that room had ever seen it doing its job. And three separate research teams, working independently, reported the same finding: fascia is densely supplied with sensory nerves.
That second finding is the whole ballgame. A tissue full of sensory nerve endings is not packing material. It’s a sensory organ — and it can generate pain.
So the honest answer to your question is that nobody taught us. Medicine turns slowly, and there are practicing physicians today who finished their training before that 2007 meeting ever happened. That’s changing — and it’s a big part of why this newsletter exists.
Have a question you want answered in a future issue? Just reply to this email.
PEMF at home: is it worth it?
It’s the question I get asked at the end of almost every PEMF session — so let’s answer it properly, including the part nobody likes to talk about: the price.
We introduced PEMF for the pelvic floor a few issues back, and PEMF for mood and relaxation just last week. The response was immediate, and it came with a consistent follow-up: can I just get one of these for my house?
The answer is yes — home PEMF units exist, and some of them are good. But “PEMF device” covers an enormous range, from clinical-grade systems down to inexpensive mats that share a marketing category and not much else. Intensity, coil design, program control, and build quality vary wildly, and so does the price. Buying blind is how people end up with an expensive object that doesn’t do what they hoped.
So we wrote it up: what home PEMF units actually do, how to tell a serious device from a gadget, who is a good candidate for owning one versus coming in for sessions, and a straight look at what the Magnus Pro costs. No hedging on the number — we think you should be able to see the price before you fall in love with the idea.
And the honest caveat: a home unit is a maintenance tool, not a diagnosis. If you don’t yet know why something hurts, a machine in your living room isn’t going to tell you. Get the answer first, then decide what belongs at home.
Educational information only, not medical advice, and not an endorsement of any particular consumer device for any specific medical condition. PEMF is not appropriate for everyone — talk with your physician first, particularly if you have an implanted electronic device such as a pacemaker, or if you are pregnant.
Welcome Sofia Murillo.
Every new patient arrives with some version of the same two questions: what is actually wrong with me, and who do I talk to? We can answer the first one. Sofia is how we answer the second.
Sofia Murillo joins FIT Therapeutics as our new Patient Concierge, and she comes to the role from somewhere I think matters. She’s a New Orleans native, a yoga instructor, and an athlete. That means she has spent years inside her own connective tissue — learning where it binds, what it feels like when a hip finally opens, how long real change actually takes. She has been the person on the mat and the person in training. When you tell her something in your body doesn’t move the way it used to, she isn’t hearing a complaint. She’s hearing something she recognizes.
It also means she’s one of you. She grew up here. She’s not learning this city on the job.
What Sofia does for you
Her job is to make FIT Therapeutics navigable — getting you to the right provider, the right assessment, and the right next step without you having to figure out our org chart to do it. That’s the part you can’t teach: someone who has done the work knows the difference between a patient who needs an appointment and a patient who needs someone to slow down and explain what’s happening to them.
And she’s starting with a big one. Sofia is handling every September OxeFit booking in New Orleans — which means the free assessment we’re offering all month runs through her. If you’ve been meaning to get a real baseline on your body, book online below and Sofia will take it from there. (In Los Angeles? Your booking link is right here.)
Welcome to the family, Sofia. We’re glad you’re here.
Know your numbers.
This week’s drill takes about as long as it does to send one message — and it turns the cover story into something you can actually use.
Next time you have blood work scheduled, ask your physician a single question: “Can we check my homocysteine, B12, and folate?” Those three values are the practical readout of the pathway the new review is about. They’re widely available and usually inexpensive — homocysteine isn’t always covered, so ask about cost — and most people have never had them run.
Two honest caveats. First, this is a conversation with your own doctor, not a self-prescription — results only mean something in the context of your history. Second, don’t start supplementing on a hunch. The evidence favors treating a measured deficiency, not treating a worry. Get the number first.
Missed last week? Catch up on Vol. X — your body’s sixth sense and fascia as a sensory organ, PEMF for mood, and the steroid myth in EDS.