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Student and Therapist Newsletter Archive
- Scientific validity of cranio sacral therapy
+ CST clinical trials. - September 07
+ How to convince Doctors of the validity
of cranio sacral therapy? - May 07
+ Should my patient’s tell their Doctor they
are having cranio sacral therapy? - December 05
***QUESTION***
Hi John
Thank you very much for your newsletters and all the wonderful info.
It was really exciting to read about Harvard Medical School's dept of
psychiatry including CST in their continuing education programme.
Hopefully this leads the way for other schools to do the same. Do you
know of any others?
My question today is how do you answer:
patients
medical practitioners
the public
who ask you for scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of CST?
Yours sincerely,
John Rosen.
South Africa
>>>MY COMMENTS:
Hello John,
Thank you for the feedback it means a lot to me. I don't know of any other
medical schools including cranio sacral in their curriculum as yet but
I will let you know if I hear of any.
I have started to include links to any news items
I come across to do with cranio sacral in the training
news part of my web sites.
Scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of
cranio sacral therapy is pretty thin on the ground. There is a lot of
what is called anecdotal evidence, which is basically people saying it
is good or helpful or wonderful, but not a lot of hard scientific evidence.
One of the reasons for this is the difficulty of applying
the normal scientific testing procedures to cranio sacral treatment. They
say it is hard to do the usual double blind experiment.
In a drug trial the test group is divided in half.
One half is given the test drug and the other half, called the control
group, is given a sugar pill. The people undergoing the test don't know
which group they are in.
The amount of improvement is measured in the two groups
and if the drug is effective there will be a substantial improvement in
the group that received the test drug.
The difficulty with applying this model of testing
to cranio sacral treatment is with the control group. Their contention
being that once you know how to do cranio you can't not do it and so provide
a viable neutral group.
This has never made sense to me because I'm sure you
could show non-cranio sacral therapists how to place their hands at different
places on a person's body to affect the appearance of giving a cranio
sacral session.
My knowledge of this area is quite limited so there
is probably more to it than that.
I've never had a lot of faith in medical trials to
begin with but particularly so after what happened with the medical trial
carried out on the Buteko method of breathing. Buteko is a method of breathing
that was developed in Russia. It is very effective with Asthma. There
was a large, well organised clinical trial held at the Mater Hospital
in Brisbane in 1995.
The trial showed that the Buteko method demonstrated
a 90% improvement rate. This is an excellent result for a clinical trial.
Most drugs are doing well if they get a 50% improvement.
For some reason the results of the trial got delayed.
When they were finally released it was 10 years after the trial had been
carried out. The results were deemed invalid because the testing methods
were obsolete.
Do Doctors and Scientists think cranio sacral therapy
is valid? By and large, the official answer is no and I think we are partly
to blame for that ourselves. The combination of in-fighting between schools
and approaches, the dilution of the therapy to the level of adjunct to
massage in parts of the world and a unilateral lack of good assessment
of students.
All of which have led to some pretty shocking people
calling themselves cranio sacral therapists. As you might have noticed
John I am a
passionate advocate of cranio sacral therapy and even I am very cautious
about referring people to cranio sacral therapists I don't know.
Top
***QUESTION***
Dear John,
I recently had a patient who told their Doctor they were having craniosacral
therapy. The Doctor dismissed it out of hand saying there was no
scientific basis for it and discouraged her from 'wasting her money'.
My patient told me she wasn't keen to continue treatment.
I intend to visit the Doctor in question and see if I can't change his
mind.
I know Dr John Upledger has done some scientific studies on CST, I am
just wondering if you know of any other studies or can suggest some good
arguments for the validity of CST.
Thank you for your newsletters.
C.S.
Sydney.
>>>MY COMMENTS:
I was only talking about this at
the seminar in Brisbane the other day. The simplest way to explain
it is to ask you to look towards the future. About one or two hundred
years in the future.
Medicine will look very different. The exclusively
mechanical model that is currently in vouge will have expanded to include
an appreciation for the body's ability to fix itself. Cranio sacral
therapy, or whatever it is called then, will feature largely.
Every ambulance and para-medical team will include a cranio
sacral therapist. Emergency rooms will include cranio sacral therapists
as standard members of staff. Maternity wards, and in particular,
delivery rooms will all have cranio sacral therapists. Every child
born will receive cranio sacral treatment within the first hours of life.
Rehabilitation facilities will be dealt with predominantly
by cranio sacral therapists. The treatment of chronic pain and illness
will rely heavily on cranio sacral therapy to provide lasting solutions.
Inmate rehabilitation programs in prisons will include
cranio sacral therapy. Children with learning difficulties will
receive cranio sacral treatment as part of their special care. The
main treatment for autism will be cranio sacral therapy.
On a hill there will be a golden castle where I will ride
out on my favourite unicorn, Tabetha.
No, hang on.
That last bit was a dream.
Now let's come back to the present. At the moment,
we are ahead of our time. We are the front runners, the pioneers.
The thing about being a pioneer is that it is difficult.
Just ask anyone from the turn of the century who was saying that one day
humans would walk on the moon. Or someone from the middle ages who was
saying that one day people would travel by air.
Think about all the things that we take for granted now,
like radio and TV and the internet. At one time they all seemed
farfetched ideas. Now they are commonplace.
The flaws in the current medical model are becoming more
and more apparent to the general public. When you think about the
future it doesn't
make sense to seek the approval or ally yourself with a model that is
failing. This is one of the reasons that I have never tried to convince
a Doctor of the validity of Cranio Sacral Therapy.
Another reason is that the methods of evaluation and the
science are not sophisticated enough yet to measure what we do.
When they are sophisticated enough than there will be more of a bridge
for us to talk.
Another reason is that we have not got our act together enough
as cranio sacral therapists. There is way too much in fighting and
'my-way-is the-right-way' sort of thing going on. Too many 4-day
courses after which you can call yourself a cranio sacral therapist.
Too much cranio sacral therapy
as an adjunct to other approaches. We can't even stick to one name
for crying out loud.
By the way I am renaming what I do, cranio-vision-quest-bio-morphic
-angelic-sacral-therapy-approach.
Good, no?
Suit yourself.
It is like the underlying fear and insecurity that often
drives therapists to associations. The thinking being that if we
all band together we will be taken more seriously.
Which leads me to ask, by whom?
Doctors? I don't think so.
The public? I doubt it.
In my experience the public will go with a referral from
someone they trust over any number of qualifications and association memberships.
So I would discourage you from confronting the Doctor.
Instead I encourage you to trust in the part of your patient that brought
her to see you.
It will do the right thing for her.
Also trust in the Doctor to acknowledge your successes.
Your work hinges on your trust in the human body's ability
to correct itself. I am encouraging you to trust in the body of
humanity to correct itself too. It really is no different.
Top
***QUESTION***
Hi John,
Wonder what you have to say about something that always leaves me wondering
what the best advice is. When a patient is having a treatment from a doctor
and they want to tell the doctor they are also having craniosacral therapy,
I never know what to tell them.
It never seems to go well
either way. Do you have a little trick to get around this one? A pithy
phrase perhaps?
Keep up the great work.
Nora P
Somerset.
>>>MY COMMENTS:
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
That's a pithy quote from Mae West.
Doesn't help with your question but I like it.
Write your own newsletter then!
Sorry Nora. No simple answer to this one. It's one
of those depending things. It depends on the patient. It depends on what's
wrong with them. It depends on the Doctor.
As a very general rule of thumb, if telling the Doctor
is going to make it harder for the patient, I will discourage it.
By harder, I mean the Doctor will feel threatened
by the patient seeking outside assistance and get defensive and then try
and regain control by scaring the patient with veiled and often outright,
threats of withdrawing support.
Not helpful and way too medieval.
Sure, there is a time for education and debate about the philosophical
merits of our different approaches.
Right in the middle of patient's health situation
is not the time. Too much pressure all around.
I have found that what works with tissues, works for
me in life.
No, not the, 'Sniff sniff, can you pass me another
please. . .' kind of tissues. The other kind.
When encountering resistance I hold. I don't push.
I wait for the easing. I try and follow each minute advance in the direction
of harmony with diligence. I know the system wants to return to equilibrium.
I follow through.
It is an approach that is applicable to almost everything
in life, including Doctors.
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