Buy My Book And Become your own Wellness Detective Here- Difficult birth - Induction - Forceps - Caesarian - Separation Anxiety
- Accidents
- Emotional Trauma - Difficult Childhood - Witnessing Violence
- Head Injuries
- Surgery
- Lumbar Puncture - Spinal Tap - Epidural
- The After Effects of Meningitis
- Lost Soul
- Misaligned Dental Fillings - Orthodontic Work
- Vaccination and Overuse of Antibiotics
BIRTH TRAUMA - INDUCTION
- FORCEPS - CEASAREAN SECTION
Even with a natural, problem free labour, a baby can
get stuck and distressed during delivery. If this happens,
even briefly, it can put substantial restrictions
into the baby's system that may not show up for years.
Modern birth is often mismanaged
from the outset. Mothers are brought into hospital at
the appointed time rather than when the baby is ready.
Waters are broken. Babies are induced. Labour is hurried.
Mother can't dilate fast enough. Babies get stuck.
Suddenly labour becomes a frenzy of 'emergency
procedures,' which never needed to happen in the first
place. Violent extractions with forceps or ventouse
(suction) are used and if they don't work it's off to
surgery for an 'emergency' caesarian.
Because of the seriousness of the
situation, and make no mistake by this stage it is serious,
the baby is literally yanked out of the mother. Even
with a planned caesarean the incision alone can often
cause trauma because of the sudden change in pressure
in the womb. This is a very different experience for
the baby from the waters breaking naturally.
Once the incision has been made the baby
has to be extracted from the womb. This means the baby
has to be grabbed . . .somewhere . . . usually by the
back of the neck to get it out.
More trauma follows. . .
The first few minutes after birth is very important
to the new born baby. The baby needs to bond with its
mother, if it is deprived that contact it can cause
lots of different conditions, from low immunity to behavioral
problems to fearful disposition and crying.
These symptoms may not show up for years.
Having the umbilical cord cut too quickly can lead to
umbilical shock which in turn can cause everything from
digestive problems to anxiety to difficulty sleeping.
All the above leads to many patterns of restriction within the babies system which in turn can lead to symptoms.
Also I have found that a difficult birth can also leave patterns of restrictions in the MOTHERS body that can cause post natal depression.
ACCIDENTS
In our day to day lives we bump into things, we trip,
we have all manner of little accidents, most of which
our bodies can repair. If we have a more serious accident
the trauma to our bodies may be so great as to put a
pattern of restriction
in our bodies that it may not be able to release without
assistance.
Let's say someone is in a car accident. The impact of the steering wheel puts a large pattern of trauma in their body. The broken bones and lacerations caused by the accident will heal within a matter of months, but the physical after-effects can go on for years - causing anything from headaches to depression or worse. Their body can release much of the pattern of restriction but it may not be able to release the entire pattern.
Also, if you have ever seen crash simulations using dummies you’ll know they move around a lot during the impact. So rather than one pattern of trauma there are many.
The other thing to consider is the depth the pattern is imprinted in the body. With patterns of restriction, the greater the force of the trauma, the deeper into the body the pattern is imprinted.
The effects of unreleased trauma from an accident may not show up for years. When the effects do begin to surface the symptoms may not be in the area of the accident. Damage to the lower spine, for example may show up as headaches or depression. This occurs because of the reciprocal nature of the system.
Just to give you an idea of how devastating accidents can be, here is a list of conditions that can all have their roots in unreleased trauma from accidents.
Attention Deficit Disorder, Aggression, Anxiety, Back pain, Behavior problems, Depression, Dyslexia, Frozen shoulder, Fibromyalgia, Headaches, Irritable bowel syndrome, Obessional behavior, Sciatica, Scoliosis, Insomnia, Sinusitis, Sleeping difficulties,Panic attacks, Spinal disc problems, Chronic fatigue, Joint problems, Torticollis, Meniere's disease, TMJ, Trigeminal neuralgia, Epilepsy, Migraines, Mood swings, Vertigo, Neck pain, Whiplash.
EMOTIONAL
TRAUMA - WITTNESSING VIOLENCE
Emotional trauma can get lodged in our bodies and remain
there unreleased causing just as much devastation as
physical trauma.
In Peter Levine's 1997 article 'Trauma - vortex of violence', he draws a mental image of a scene from the Serengeti plains. A cheetah is stalking an impala. He describes the seventy mile an hour chase with the cheetah closing in. Just before the cheetah is about to bring the impala down, the impala does a strange thing.
It drops to the ground as if it's already dead. It has tried the 'fight or flight' response. Its flight was unsuccessful. So it then goes into the 'freezing response'. Even though the impala's body is still being flooded with adrenalin, it plays dead. All the blood leaves the impala’s extremities, this happens so that if the cheetah decides to drag it behind a bush for later consumption, the impala won't suffer from too much loss of blood and can make its escape.
The other thing that happens is the impala's brain releases huge amounts of endorphins into its system. Endorphins are nature’s little happy drugs. Many times more powerful than heroin they put the impala in a euphoric trance and so distanced from being gobbled up.
Let's say that doesn't happen and the cheetah goes off to find her cubs. Once it knows it is safe the impala does not run away immediately. Instead the impala gets to its feet and starts to shake violently. This has the effect of shaking off the endorphins and discharging the built-up energy of the chase. Then after a good shake it does this even weirder thing. It sort of runs on the spot, vigorously. What it is doing is enacting its escape from the cheetah, completing the chase but this time with a happy ending.
All the above actually happens quite quickly and once it's done, the impala trots off to rejoin the heard. From the impala point of view it's not such a big deal because it happens to them frequently. They haven't got time to dwell on it and they are experts at discharging the built-up energy as a result of it.
It is different for people. We are not so used to life or death situations and have adapted our responses in different ways. For example, it is very common for people who have experienced trauma to have continually cold hands and feet and be in a sort of dreamy other-world all the time. They can remain like this years after the trauma happened.
The cold hands are because the blood never fully returned to the extremities and the dreamy state is because the brain has continued to release an elevated level of endorphins.
One of the main reasons the trauma
remains stuck in their body is because unlike the impalas,
we have no culture of enacting or completing traumatic
events.
Let's face it, intense shaking and acting out of happy
endings to traumatic events are not something we generally
encourage or support. If someone started to do it beside
you at the local coffee shop, chances are it would be
very disturbing to witness.
One of the things cranio sacral therapy does is assist the emotional trauma to release and dissipate gently.
To give you an idea of how subtle and long lasting emotional trauma can be let me morph a couple of patients together to illustrate the point.
Two men, Bill and Ben, come to see
me for treatment. They are both 40yrs old and they both
have frozen shoulder. Frozen shoulder is where you can't
move your arm without it being really painful.
Here's what happened.
When the Bill was six years old, he was walking past a building site. A careless builder dropped a brick from the scaffold and it hit Bill on the shoulder, breaking his collar bone. The bone healed within a couple of weeks but the imprint of the trauma never fully released. Bill's body kept trying to release the pattern of restriction from the accident but it couldn't fully. Eventually his body was unable to compensate for the restriction anymore and this showed up as symptoms. The end result with Bill was that by the time he was 40 he had developed frozen shoulder.
Now let's talk about Ben. When he
was six years old, he was taking a walk with his Father
in the park. His Father was a little preoccupied because
he was currently unemployed and unsure of his next job.
Just before they reached the pond they met a friend
of Ben's father who began to talk with him about the
possibility of a job.
Ben really wanted to continue on to the pond but his
Father wouldn't let him without his supervision.
His Dad asked Ben to be quiet and
patient while he talked with his friend.
Ben was not impressed with this. He pulled on his Father's
hand and carried on in general. Eventually his Father
finished his conversation and the friend went on his
way.
As soon as he was out of earshot Ben's Father rounded
on Ben. He was livid. He told Ben he was very naughty
and that he was a selfish little boy. As he said this
he kept tapping Ben on the shoulder to reinforce his
point. Not a very severe physical trauma but because
his Father was angry and saying bad things about him,
it penetrated Ben's system with the same level of imprint
as a brick.
The moment passed. His Father found work soon after and life moved on but the imprint of the emotional trauma never released fully, with the result that by the time he was 40, Ben had developed frozen shoulder.
This idea of emotional trauma getting
locked in our bodies is based on what is called 'Tissue
Memory.' Tissue memory is the idea that the imprint
of emotionally traumatic events is not exclusively stored
in our conscious mind, but in the cells of our bodies.
If you find that that hard to believe, think about it
in terms of DVD's.
A DVD is made of a sort of tin foil sandwiched between two layers of plastic. There is nothing too amazing about that, yet when the DVD is played through the DVD player and we watch the movie, we laugh and cry and become emotionally engaged.
The cells in our bodies are a lot more complex than a DVD. They store an incredible amount of information and perform a mind-boggling number of tasks every second. Isn’t it plausible that they can also store individual memory?
HEAD
INJURIES
Head injuries deserve a section to themselves because
they can have such devastating long term repercussions.
The initial effect of head injuries can be often severe
and life threatening but once the danger is over, the
ongoing symptoms can often be subtle and very debilitating.
Symptoms, like aggression, agitation, poor attention span, anxiety, poor memory, difficulty sleeping, temperature fluctuation and so on.
Head injuries leave patterns of restriction in the membranes in the head. In my experience a small amount of pressure in the wrong part of the brain can have widespread effects. When I say small I mean a few microns. A sheet of paper is 100 microns thick. Head injuries also often lead to restricted drainage in the head.
Not every trauma to the head causes sever symptoms. It depends where the restriction is putting pressure on the brain. I have treated people with patterns of restriction in their head who had no symptoms other than the physical appearance. Jill Orange is a good example of this.
SURGERY
Every structure in the body is covered
in a thin membrane called Fascia.
From the smallest neuron to large structures like your
lungs or your liver, they are all covered in fascia.
Fascia forms a connective covering that encapsulates
your whole body.
If you look at the back of your hand as you wiggle your fingers, what you are looking at is the outer layer of fascia of your hand. Below it many layers of fascia are gliding over each other as your fingers move.
To get an idea
of what effect surgery has on all that wrapping, think
of 20 layers of Glad Wrap, one on top of another,
with a thin layer of fluid between each layer. When
your body is functioning normally, each layer glides
easily over the next.
Surgery would be like if you took a knife
and sliced through all those layers and then trying
to get them to realign in exactly the same place.
When the different layers of fascia don't line up, they kind of stick together in unnatural ways as the wound heals. This sticking together forms what are called adhesions.
Add to that the trauma your body undergoes during surgery. You may be unconscious but from your body's perspective being cut is still being cut and is traumatic.
What cranio sacral therapy does is help the trauma of being cut to release and assist the layers of fascia to find a more natural, pre-surgery place to return to.
LUMBAR PUNCTURE - SPINAL
TAP - EPIDURAL
What an Epidural, Lumbar Puncture or Spinal Tap have
in common is that they all penetrate the tough membrane
surrounding the spine called the Dura Mater.
I have treated a number of people whose symptoms have come from a lumbar puncture or an epidural. The root cause of the symptoms can go undetected for years because they are occurring elsewhere in the body. For example, if you are getting chronic headaches or neck pain, an epidural you had 5 years ago is probably not the first thing you will think of as the cause. The reason the symptoms can appear away from the site of the trauma is because of the reciprocal nature of the cranio sacral system.
Another aspect of the trauma pattern caused by these procedures is a disturbance of the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. Though there isn’t a huge amount of cerebrospinal fluid in your body, about a half a standard glass, and there is only a small amount removed for a lumbar puncture, about 2ml, it is such a vital fluid that any disturbance can have widespread effects.
To give you an idea of how sensitive the amount of cerebrospinal fluid in your body is, when you have you have a lumbar puncture you will be told to lie down for 6 hours. That is, remain completely horizontal for 6 hours or more. The reason for this is that if you don’t you may get severe headaches.
THE
AFTER EFFECTS OF MENINGITIS
Meningitis is the inflammation of the protective membranes
covering the brain and spinal cord. Another name for
these membranes is the meninges. Most cases of meningitis
are caused by microorganisms, such as viruses, bacteria,
fungi, or parasites, that spread into the blood and
into the cerebrospinal
fluid.
When the infection is over the membranes are often left with a from of scaring which can affect the delicate balance within the head causing symptoms from headaches to epilepsy.
LOST SOUL
This is a poetic term I use to describe a condition
I see regularly. It is where a person feels like their
life has lost its meaning. Where the joy has gone
and they are 'off track'. Day to day feels like just
going through the motions and nothing has any real
meaning. They feel their life doesn't represent them
at all. It is often described to me as waking up one
morning and realizing that they are not living the
life they thought they would or know they should.
Cranio sacral therapy helps with this because it works with the cerebrospinal fluid, which as well as being crucial fluid from physical perspective is also at the core of who we are. I have found that working with this fluid, helping it to flow better and assisting any restrictions in the container of this fluid to release helps the person come to terms with these issues in their own way.
What generally happens is that people come in with this lost soul condition, then during the course of treatment they reconnect with themselves in a very deep way. Because this happens at a very deep level there is usually no need for extensive talking or probing the past. The changes occur gently and over time. Generally people look back and realise how far they have come rather than being daunted at the outset by how far they have to travel.
MISSALIGNED DENTAL FILLINGS
- ORTHODONTIC WORK
Over the course of our lives we can accumulate a number
of restrictions.
These restrictions may not show up as symptoms because
our bodies can compensate for them. If we have dental
work and our bite changes slightly, in some cases,
this is can be the last straw for our bodies. It can
be one too many things for our system to compensate
for and we can develop symptoms. These symptoms may
occur weeks after the dental procedure and so make
it hard to link. The most common symptoms I have treated
for this are headaches, neck pain, face pain.
VACCINATION AND OVERUSE
OF ANTIBIOTICS
Vaccination is a hotly debated subject and in the
end is a decision parents must come to themselves.
I encourage parents to become educated about both
sides of the argument before they make their decision.
"There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunization of children does more harm than good."---Dr. J. Anthony Morris, former Chief Vaccine Control Officer and research virologist, US FDA
"There is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza. The producers of these vaccines know that they are worthless, but they go on selling them, anyway."------Dr. J. Anthony Morris (formerly Chief Vaccine Control Officer at the FDA)"The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization…There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease… There are significant risks associated with every immunization and numerous contraindications that make it dangerous for the shots to be given to your child… While the myriad short-term hazards of most immunizations are known (but rarely explained), no one knows the long-term consequences of injecting foreign proteins into the body of your child. Even more shocking is the fact that no one is making any structured effort to find out."
Robert Mendelsohn, MD.
Should We Be Vaccinating Our Children? by Alan Pelowski MA ND RCST
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is a national, non-profit organization dedicated to preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and defending the right to informed consent to vaccination.
ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute. Offer an extensive selection of uncensored information on childhood shots and other immunizations.
Australian Vaccination Network. The AVN urges you to investigate before you vaccinate.
VACCINATION.CO.UK tries to assist parents in the decision making process on immunisation, by providing you with what they consider to be balanced objective information.
VACCINATIONNEWS.COM
Source for ARCHIVED and BREAKING NEWS - Reporting
ALL SIDES Of The Vaccination Controversy.
ANTIBIOTICS
To understand how antibiotics work, you have to understand
the two types of germs that can make you sick: bacteria
and viruses.
Although certain bacteria and viruses cause diseases with similar symptoms, the ways these two organisms multiply and spread illness are actually quite different.
Bacteria are living organisms existing as single cells. Bacteria are everywhere and most don't cause any harm, and in some cases may be beneficial. Lactobacillus, for example, live in the intestine and help digest food. But some bacteria are harmful and can cause illness by invading the human body, multiplying, and interfering with normal bodily processes. Antibiotics are effective against bacteria because they work to kill these living organisms by stopping their growth and reproduction.
Viruses, on the other hand, are
not alive and cannot exist on their own - they are
particles containing genetic material wrapped in a
protein coat. Viruses "live," grow, and
reproduce only after they've invaded other living
cells. Some viruses may be fought off by the body's
own immune system before they cause illness, but others
(colds, flu, and chicken pox, for example) must simply
run their course.
Viruses do not respond to antibiotics at all.
Why It's Harmful to Overuse Antibiotics.
Taking antibiotics for colds and other viral illnesses
not only won't work, but it also has a dangerous side
effect: over time, this practice helps create bacteria
that have become more of a challenge to kill.
What frequent and inappropriate use of antibiotics does is select strains of bacteria that can resist treatment. This is called bacterial resistance. These resistant bacteria require higher doses of medicine or stronger antibiotics to treat. Doctors have even found bacteria that are resistant to some of the most powerful antibiotics available today.
Antibiotic resistance is a widespread
problem, and one that the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention calls "one of the world's
most pressing public health problems." Bacteria
that were once highly responsive to antibiotics have
become increasingly resistant. Among those that are
becoming harder to treat are pneumococcal infections
(which cause pneumonia, ear infections, sinus infections,
and meningitis), skin infections, and tuberculosis.
Taking Antibiotics Safely
To minimize the risk of bacterial resistance, keep
the following tips in mind.
Treat only bacterial infections. Seek advice and ask
questions. Ask whether your illness is bacterial or
viral, and discuss the risks and benefits of antibiotics.
If it's a virus, don't pressure your doctor to prescribe
anyway.
Letting milder illnesses (especially those thought
to be caused by viruses) run their course to avoid
the development of drug-resistant germs.