| When we
discuss physical medicine in, in our modern western
society, the roots actually go back to early days in
China and as well as in Greece and Rome. And the
concepts that we have in this lineage going from those
ancient times up to our own are rather simple.
It’s a binary kind of
relationship. Either bones or muscles are out of place
and tight and painful or they’re in the midline and
they’re good and they feel good. It’s an out or in
situation.
It’s rather simplistic
and yet it underlies physical medicine for physical
therapists, for massage therapists, for chiropractors,
for osteopaths, for naturopathic doctors. For the
medical doctors that specialize in physical medicine,
they are called physiatrists.
For all of us, it’s a
binary situation. Bones and muscles are out or in. So,
the way that we would work with bones would be if they
were out of place, we would devise different techniques
to push them back in.
And that’s how I was
trained when I went through medical school as well. And
when I started in practice, I started finding out that
for many people it was a short-term relationship.
I would push the bones
and we released the muscles so they would go into place
and two or four weeks later, most of those people would
return and say, "Doctor, you did that very well. Would
you please do I again?"
Well, when I went to
talk to my instructors, who were men with 40 or 50 years
in medical practice and asked them what I was doing
wrong, for the most part their conclusion wasn’t that I
was doing something wrong, it was instead that these
patients were chronically injured. That chronic injury
was preventing these people from being able to in their
terms hold an adjustment which meant that they would
never get well. And it was my job to give them relief
from pain and to continue treating them again and again,
ad infinitum. On and on and on.
Well, there was
something about that that bothered me. It was kind of
like a bell going off in my head, saying that what they
told me was wrong.
I knew somewhere that
there was a solution. I knew in my heart there was a
solution for these people and there was a way that they
could be made better. That they weren’t really injured
that much.
It didn’t seem right
that a person with a reasonably minor car injury, where
they sustained a whiplash in the neck, that 10 and 20
years later, they would have still have headaches
virtually every day because of, you know, a situation
where they didn’t even sustain a broken bone.
Well, the conclusion of
my findings is what we call NeuroCranial Restructuring.
And the way that that idea developed is easier to talk
about with a model than it is just to use words.
So, I brought along my
friend. This is not Igor, in fact it’s not poor Rorick.
It’s not even Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a plastic
skull. And, if you start looking at the skull, you can
see how complex the relationship of all the bones are.
And how much they interlock.
Do you see the bone
that is colored with the red pen here and here? And when
I turn the head to the side, it’s here. When I turn the
head upside down, it goes all the way in from the hard
palette, in behind the nose and comes up against the
back of the head, the occiput. Do you see how complex
all those joints are?
Let me go further. That
same bone is here inside the head. This bone is called
the sphenoid. The sphenoid bone as you can see sits in
the center of the head.
Virtually all the bones
in the head are in contact with that sphenoid bone.
Anyone that says they can move the skull in a way that’s
going to last must be changing this sphenoid bone.
And yet, as it is
obvious from showing you, you can’t get your hands on
that sphenoid bone. This bone is the most crucial part
in NeuroCranial Restructuring. This is the key to how we
can change the entire body.
What I found, when I
was working with patients before and I would work with
their spine and other problems in their bodies and I
would work on individual bones in their back and in
their pelvis, the body kept reverting to type because
that function, the pain, the mobility, these were minor
considerations compared to these structures more
important jobs.
The main thing that the
spine is there to do is to hold up your head. To your
body, the most important part of your body, even though
you need your heart and lungs and liver, in order to
live, the most important part of your body is your
brain. Remember, if you cut off your arm, you are still
you. If you cut off your head, you cease to exist.
So, just like a
computer, your head doesn’t want to jiggle. Have you
ever tried to add up a column of figures when you rode
your bicycle down a stairway?
You know that what you
normally do is to hold on. That’s about all you can do.
You can’t really think about anything else. You can’t
multi-task like a modern-day computer.
You can instead just
hold on. But, when you are sitting comfortably in your
chair and thinking, you can be listening to the TV, you
can be hearing people in the back of the house talking,
and meanwhile you can be reading a book and even
thinking about something else all at the same time
because you have a magnificent computer and it sits
inside.
Your body wants to
protect your brain. So, in order to prevent it from
jiggling, what we do is we arrange the bones in our
spine and pelvis into a position that stabilizes the
skull. And that stability requires the bones to not be
in the mid-line most of the time because the head is
balancing on top of these two balance points.
These are known as the occipital chondyles. And this,
these two points are where your neck meets your, your
head. Sort of like my fingers, okay? You are balancing
on top of them. |