Craniosacral Therapy
By KAREN von HAHN
Saturday, January 3, 2004 - Page L3, The Globe and Mail
My prescription for world peace in the year 2004? Give everybody a massage each week. Think of it: Freed from headaches and stress, we would be too chilled out for road rage, domestic violence or international terrorism. Not just any old massage would do, of course. For this task, we'd have to bring out the Cadillac of hands-on healing: craniosacral therapy.
Craniosacral therapy is a conundrum. It is based on working with the craniosacral system -- a system that the medical community doesn't acknowledge exists -- and it involves such a light touch (the "weight of a nickel") that while it's happening you feel a little silly, because it seems like nothing is going on. At the conclusion of a treatment by a really good practitioner, however, you find yourself reduced to such a deeply relaxed pile of jelly (sometimes weeping copious hot tears -- be prepared), you can barely push yourself off the massage table before you float out the door.
Dr. Norman Allan, a practitioner of alternative medicine in Toronto, calls craniosacral therapy "good for almost anything yet difficult to define." The growing number of patients who come to his office seeking relief from chronic, stress-related contemporary ills, such as headaches, TMJ syndrome and neck and back tension, often find relief in craniosacral because the treatment is "the membrane's edge between the mind, body and spirit, and that's where it excels -- where mind, body and spirit meet," he says.
Craniosacral has two founding fathers.
The first is an American osteopath named Dr. William Sutherland, who discovered in the early 19th century that the adult human skull, was not, as has been widely held, fixed and rigid, but designed to move.
"Everybody thought he was crazy," says Ann Bernard, a Toronto-based occupational therapist. "They called him Bonehead Bill because he went around wearing this football helmet fitted with screws and jotted down notes in a behaviour diary."
According to Bernard, what Sutherland found from close study was that the skull has sutures, or joints, which look like the gills of a fish. "He decided right then that this must be for a purpose, the brain must have to breathe," she says.
From this observation grew the school of cranial osteopathy, which works on the premise that a healthy cranium expands and contracts in response to the rhythmic flow of cerebrospinal fluid (the fluid that circulates around the brain and spinal cord and gets tapped in a spinal tap).
In the early 1970s, another osteopath named John Upledger, who was assisting a spinal operation, observed this phenomenon firsthand. When asked to hold the dura mater, the outermost layer of the sheath surrounding the spinal cord, Upledger found that it was moving rhythmically. "It was not synchronous with [the patient's] breathing," he wrote. "It did not synchronize with the heart rate that I could see on the cardiac monitor. It was another bodily rhythm at about 10 cycles per minute that seemed very reliable and consistent."
In his view, the unnamed function he observed -- a rhythmic beat of cerebrospinal fluid moving up and down the craniosacral system -- was the "core" of the patient. He went on to develop ways to utilize this core system to treat everything from autism to chronic neck and back pain, anger and depression, at an eponymous institute he founded in Florida. He dubbed his method craniosacral therapy.
It all sounds wacko, and yet the therapy's cathartic benefits are becoming increasingly popular in certain circles. According to W magazine, cranial is so hot in England that Princes William and Harry, as well as many a "name" West End actor, line up to see osteopath Vicki Vlachonis, who works out of London's posh Claridge's hotel.
A craniosacral therapy session typically begins with the patient lying down, fully clothed, on his or her back on a treatment table. Although it is all about rhythmic pressure in the head, the therapist usually starts with the feet, "listening" for tiny movements and restrictions in the underlying connective tissue of the body. The therapist will also place his or her hands under the tailbone, as well as underneath the head and neck, and make the tiniest of featherweight adjustments.
The idea, according to Toronto's Anita Shack, a therapist with a bustling practice, is to work with the craniosacral rhythm to bring it to a still point around a restriction, so that the surrounding muscles will release and "unwind."
For patients, the hour rushes by, feeling like nothing has happened except maybe a nap. And yet they emerge strangely renewed. Given our insane pace, this may be one reason why the practice has moved from the fringe of alternative therapy to front and centre.
In 1987, Alex McLaughlin and her husband, Robert Harris, both of whom studied under Upledger, founded the Cranial Therapy Centre in Toronto. "Ten years ago, if you told people about craniosacral, they would look at you like you were from Mars," McLaughlin says. "Just the idea of cranial bones moving generated hostility."
The centre now gets referrals from doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children and houses seven practitioners who are constantly booked.
In the opinion of Bernard, the appeal of the therapy lies in its subtlety. "It's so safe, we get in under your defences," she says.
"We work with the soft tissue matrix of the body in an indirect way," McLaughlin explains. "It's like if a dresser drawer is stuck and you try to shove it in. We go into the restriction instead, and very gently hold it at its still point until it corrects itself. Which is how it can be so light and go so deep at the same time."