Craniosacral therapy

Practitioners of CST claim it is effective in treating a wide range of conditions, sometimes claiming it is a cancer cure, or a cure-all. Practitioners particularly advocate the use of CST on children. at least two deaths had been reported resulting from CST spinal manipulation. In a small study, participants with head injuries suffered worsening symptoms as a result of CST. it is a pseudoscience, The idea of a craniosacral rhythm cannot be scientifically supported. Systematic reviews In October 2012, Edzard Ernst conducted a systematic review of randomized clinical trials of craniosacral therapy. He concluded that "the notion that CST is associated with more than non-specific effects is not based on evidence from rigorous randomised clinical trials." Commenting specifically on this conclusion, Ernst wrote on his blog that he had chosen the wording as "a polite and scientific way of saying that CST is bogus." Ernst criticized a 2011 systematic review performed by Jakel and von Hauenschild for including observational studies and including studies with healthy volunteers. A 2019 systematic review found limited evidence that CST may bring some relief for up to six months for people with chronic pain. However, the conclusions of this study were disputed by the Office for Science and Society at McGill University due to the poor methodological quality of the individual studies that made up the analysis. Regulation Edzard Ernst wrote that in 2005 in the United Kingdom, a foundation of then-Prince Charles issued a booklet listing CST as one of several popular alternative therapies, but admitted that the therapy was unregulated and lacked either a defined training program or the oversight of a professional body. Ernst wrote that this makes the therapists practising CST "less regulated than publicans." ==History ==

Cranial osteopathy, a forerunner of CST, was devised in the 1930s by William Garner Sutherland. While looking at a disarticulated skull, Sutherland was struck by the idea that the cranial sutures of the temporal bones where they meet the parietal bones were "beveled, like the gills of a fish, indicating articular mobility for a respiratory mechanism." Later, independent reviews of these studies concluded that they presented no good evidence for the effectiveness of craniosacral therapy or the existence of the proposed cranial bone movement. == Conceptual basis ==

Practitioners of both cranial osteopathy and CST assert that there are small, rhythmic motions of the cranial bones attributed to cerebrospinal fluid pressure or arterial pressure. The premise of CST is that palpation of the cranium can be used to detect this rhythmic movement of the cranial bones and selective pressures may be used to manipulate the cranial bones to achieve a therapeutic result. However, there is no evidence that the bones of the human skull can be moved by such manipulations. Comparing CST to cranial osteopathy, Upledger wrote: "Dr. Sutherland's discovery regarding the flexibility of skull sutures led to the early research behind CranioSacral Therapy– and both approaches affect the cranium, sacrum and coccyx– the similarities end there." However, modern-day cranial osteopaths largely consider the two practices to be the same, but that cranial osteopathy has "been taught to non-osteopaths under the name CranialSacral therapy." == References ==