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technique that you will be able to apply immediately, take
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within 5 years. Get in on the cutting edge now!"
"Exasperation"- a
short essay by Dean Howell, ND
Have you ever been frustrated
with patients whose structures continually return to the
same pattern, regardless of your treatment techniques? Have
you ever been upset to be told that a patient had a chronic
injury and therefore could only be given brief respite from
their pain? I was angry about it!
NCR is the outgrowth of over 19
years of clinical experience and frustration with physical
medicine. When I was in school, my anatomy instructors were
still teaching the archaic concept of skull fusion. The
treatment concepts and protocols that I learned were
essentially unchanged since the early 1900’s. It was only
with physical medicine concepts that there seemed to be this
stasis; with other aspects of medicine, there were new
developments.
I learned manipulation of hard and
soft tissues from men with thirty to fifty years of clinical
experience. The younger doctors would ask these same men for
advice when they were confused. Yet when it came to
biochemical questions or questions regarding toxicity of
substances, we were quick to pull out the current research.
At the time I accepted this situation; I didn’t question why
there were no new concepts in physical medicine. Now I do.
I think that physical medicine
represents the fourth leg of natural medicine: (1)
Biochemistry (2) Detoxification (3) Lifestyle (4) Structure
or Physical Medicine.
You cannot often heal a physical
medicine structure with nutrition, supplements of
detoxification. This is because these are not nutritional,
lifestyle or toxic exposure problems. In many cases, only
physical medicine techniques are appropriate, and they do
not work often enough.
When I looked at my training (in
retrospect), I realized that there were few unifying
concepts in physical medicine treatments:
- Bones should line up where
we think they should be
- Muscles shouldn’t be
tight.
This meant that we should push,
pull, massage, exercise, stretch or use braces or other
devices to coerce the muscles and bones into the positions
that we thought were best for the body. To the frustration
of all concerned, these patients’ bodies continually return
to the previous pattern of alignment.
My realization was that these
simple concepts are wrong. For example, when a patient had a
whiplash injury and his neck straightened out, I decided to
pretend that the body was working properly instead of being
injured. I could find no conflict with the clinical
findings. This meant that the body had a functional reason
to align the neck in a straighter pattern. Then I needed to
determine why the body needed to align this way and treat
the cause. I found that the reason why the body straightened
the neck pattern after a whiplash injury was to support the
head more effectively. The local injury to the neck is
quickly treated. This is the reason why a person with
whiplash makes steady improvement when treatment is
initiated—the local treatment techniques are treating the
local trauma. When medical stability is realized, the local
treatment is finished and the so-called chronic injury
remains.
At this point, the generalized body
reaction to the injury has not been addressed. What
typically remains is the cranial trauma. The whiplash injury
moves the head anteriorly, creating a straighter neck to
support the weight of the head. The proprioceptive system
moves the bones of the body into the most convenient stable
pattern for the skull, even if this stable pattern causes
pain and poor functioning in other areas of the body. This
means that most musculoskeletal problems are not local
problems—they have systemic causation. Local therapy is
unable to create lasting changes in the musculoskeletal
system because it is not treating the cause of the
structural patterns.
Let me restate that. Cranial
stability has the highest priority in the body’s physical
hierarchy. It is more important than pain or musculoskeletal
function. When I performed conventional physical medicine
therapies on my patients, I destabilized them. Because the
proprioceptive system didn’t like this, the body would
return to the nearest stable alignment.
The object of treatment, then, is
to find physical medicine modalities that work with the
body’s proprioceptive system. The widely practiced
techniques of muscle, spine and cranial manipulation have
low percentages of success. Evidently they are not
addressing the situation well. When I researched cranial
techniques, I found writings going back into the 1930’s and
even the 1920’s that reported the ineffectiveness of
external cranial treatment. The conclusion of these early
thinkers was that the sphenoid positioning is paramount in
cranial bone positions, primarily because of the central
position that the sphenoid bone has in cranial bone
interrelationships. It became apparent that the sphenoid is
poorly represented on the external surfaces of the skull,
and the greater mass of the internal surfaces of the
sphenoid cannot be accessed easily.
Practitioners developed techniques
to move the sphenoid bone internally, using fingers up the
nose and into the throat as well as inflating small balloons
in patient’s noses—all to move the sphenoid through direct
contact. These techniques are generally ineffective, yet in
a few cases they proved so successful that the whole field
remained tantalizing.
The question had become: How do
we move the sphenoid bone and make it stay?
I had used Bilateral Nasal Specific
Technique for years and found it somewhat effective. With
BNS, a small finger cot is lubricated, inserted sequentially
among the six nasal meati into the nasopharynx and then
inflated for two to five seconds with a sphygnomometer bulb.
The problem with BNS was that it was sometimes painful and
generally gave only temporary results for conditions other
than nasal ones (hence the name).
Patients with severe chronic
problems often became permanent patients because of the
relief that they received. This was frustrating to my
patients and to me. While I was trying to make my treatments
last longer, I discovered that the sphenoid bone’s relative
position and the stress patterns in the cranial structure
could be analyzed. As I began to see the sphenoid bone as a
bone connected with a network of bones that collectively
determined their positions, the ability to make greater
changes in the bone position developed. But the treatments
still didn’t last or accumulate much.
This approach is the foundation for
the NeuroCranial Restructuring™. I employ methods of
manipulation that have been in use for at least sixty years.
However, the analysis and thinking techniques I use began in
1995.
Dean Howell, ND
NCR is spectacular in most
cases. Here is a short list of the conditions successfully
treated with NeuroCranial Restructuring™.
- Balance problems
- Depression
- Dystonia
- Headache
- Learning disabilities
- Lumbar lordosis
- Neck and back pain
- Scoliosis
- Seizures
- Sleep Apnea
- Sinusitis
- Tempero Mandibular Dysfunction
- Thoracic Kyphosis
- Whiplash syndrome