I finally took my son back to a behavioral optometrist. Interesting visit. He is getting glasses—developmental—my son says it is easier to read with them. The OD told me they were very weak but should help integrate him.
He should need them for about a year.
I asked about his tracking, ect. and he doesn’t think it is a vision problem. He said it is more integrative, a sensory integration issue. This is the same type of thing I have been told by our Neuronet therapist, but she was originally trained as an audiologist so it is reassuring to hear it from an OD. Anyway, he noticed some strange things. My son’s jaw moves when he moves his eyes!!!! He also commented that he leans forward when he walks and, of course, he still can walk on his toes.
He recommended, among other things, a therapist who does cranial sacral therapy. He said he has taken his own child to her. I did a goggle search and it seems pretty harmless, which is the first criteria, but wondered if anyone had any positive or negative experience with it.
He told me after he had done more body work we could consider more vision therapy (we had done some when he was 7, he now is 10) for fine tuning.
Beth
CS therapy
I ran into someone the other day who swears by this. She is a teacher and has 5 children.
I may give it a try at some point if we run into a road block.
That is interesting coming from the OD. He could have easily sold you more therapy but instead recommended something else.
Thanks for the info Lori.
We just finished IM with an ending score of 23. His timing is perfect with his hands into the low teens. He still had one poor score with the balancing exercise in the 50s but overall most scores were in the teens so that could have been a fluke.
It took over 40 sessions. I lost count.
My son is a different child from when we began. His football coach wants to know what I did to him because he wants to do it with half the team.
Re: cranial sacral therapy recommended by OD
I feel somewhat skeptical about cranial /sacro work, but recently my physiatrist recommended it to me for my back problems. I totally respect his opinion and he’s not usually that alternative so who knows.
Re: cranial sacral therapy recommended by OD
I spoke to an OT at my youngest birthday party today. She told me she had a class in cranial sacral therapy. She told me she prefers IM because she likes the numbers, but also said she has had it work with certain kids. She also said she really only has introductory knowledge of it. When I described my son, she told me that she can see why the OD recommended it for him.
I feel like we’ve reached another road block with him. While he is doing quite well this year, repeating fourth grade in the parochial school, there are still remaining issues that we haven’t been able to get a handle on. We made a lot of progress in a vareity of areas, post IM, until this past summer. But he still skips words and lines and I now have had a second person tell me it isn’t visual.
I too am a skeptic but I thought it was interesting that it was training an OT received. I am going to call, I think, and see what she says.
I will report back, what kind of results, if any, we see.
Beth
Re: cranial sacral therapy recommended by OD
When I heard of this therapy a while ago, I conducted a search for research on its safety, and efficacy. There wasn’t much out there, but I did find a review of the research by the British Columbia Office of Health Technology Assessment. Posted below is the discussion section of that agency’s report, along with a link for viewing the full report.
Andrea
http://www.chspr.ubc.ca/bcohta/pdf/cranio.PDF
patients.
BC Office of Health Technology Assessment
Craniosacral Therapy
40
4.0 DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS
This systematic review found there is insufficient scientific evidence to recommend craniosacral
therapy to patients, practitioners or third party payers for any clinical condition.
The literature suggests that the adult cranium does not obliterate, fuse or ossify its sutures until
well into late life. There is also some evidence (albeit of variable research quality) that there is
potential movement at these suture sites in earlier life. Questions remain as to whether such
“movement” is detectable by human palpation or whether mobility has any influence on health or
disease.
The authors of this review also note that, in accord with a basic tenet of craniosacral therapy,
there is evidence for a craniosacral rhythm, impulse or “primary respiration” independent of other
measurable body rhythms (heart rate, or respiration). Avezaat & Eijndhoven ’86 (40) and Feinberg
& Mark ’87 (46) used sophisticated technology to gain an understanding of the phenomenon.
However, these and other studies do not provide any valid evidence that such a craniosacral
“rhythm” or “pulse” can be reliably perceived by an examiner. Our review does not suggest any
reasonable data that would allow such a conclusion. The influence of this craniosacral rhythm on
health or disease states is completely unknown.
Clinicians require a reliable means of assessment for decision making. Craniosacral assessment
has not been shown to be reliable.
The literature on craniosacral therapy does not include any high grade evidence, such as random
controlled trials, of its effects on health outcomes. (20) The evidence that is available is of poor
methodological quality, is highly variable, lacks consistency and does not allow any logical
“positive” conclusions regarding craniosacral therapy.
Upledger (’95), osteopath and founder of the Institute of Craniosacral Integration, argues that:
“[P]ositive patient outcomes as a result of CranioSacral Therapy should
weigh greater than data from designed research protocols involving
human subjects, as it is not possible to control all of the variables of such
studies. (56)
BC Office of Health Technology Assessment
Craniosacral Therapy
41
This point of view has successfully been countered by groups such as the Quantitative Methods
Working Group of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine,(57) as well
as the Cochrane Collaboration on Complementary and Alternative Medicine.(58) Many validated
measures of a variety of health outcomes exist to measure ‘positive patient outcomes’. Complex
complementary medical systems can be studied as ‘gestalts’ (integrated wholes) for the purpose of
evaluation from within an intervention/trials framework. Claims that the scientific methods
currently available are not suitable for evaluating the therapies variously categorized as ‘nontraditional’,
‘alternative’, or ‘complementary’ are not valid.
The issue is not that craniosacral therapy is a “non mainstream” entity.(59) Rigorous and
scientifically defensible studies are clearly possible on all its aspects. If undertaken, such research
would be of great value in providing the necessary direction for administrators, practitioners and
patients alike
Re: cranial sacral therapy recommended by OD
Thanks Andrea. What you posted is actually what I’d expect. I wish that some of these developers/promoters of alternative medicine would understand that clinical trials are not inconsistent with their methodology. Still, I think there are many things outside western medicine that are effective but there is lots of room for quacks too.
Certainly, it is buyer beware!!
Beth
cranial-sacral therapy
You might want to read John Upledger’s book. I can’t remember the name but I’m sure you could find it on amazon.com. I’m talking about his book for general audiences, not his technical books for practitioners.
I know several parents of children with autism and severe ADHD who are very pleased with the results of cranial sacral therapy including a physical therapist who took her autistic daughter to the Upledger Institute.
My son had a number of treatments with a highly qualified practitioner (also trained as a physical therapist) and we saw some interesting short-term but not long-term results. At the very least I would say the treatment is extremely benign.
Hi Beth,
My DS did quite a few sessions of cranial sachral therapy in 2nd Grade. My mom learned about it from someone she knows. We went to the Upledger Institute in Palm Beach which is where Dr. Upledger (the Dr. who developed the therapy) is.
DS really disliked this (like he dislikes everything we’ve tried to do…except IM). All he needed to do was lie there and he wasn’t cooperative so we didn’t give the therapy a good chance to work. I was hoping to see improvement with his visual system, particularly, from this. I recall them telling me about a connection between neck mobility and vision (DS is also nearsighted in addition to developmental vision issues). Also, at the time, he was doing forward and backward rolls with neuronet and having a hard time with the backward ones….I was hoping this would help that.
It’s weird because my mom and I were just talking about this the other day. One time she came with us and DS was really angry during the session and he ended up curled up into a fetal position like a newborn making gurgling sounds. It was really weird. It was particularly interesting, because they believe these problems occur during the birthing process and 1 session of CS therapy on a newborn is all it takes to fix the stresses on a newborn that can, if left unfixed, become LD’s and worse.
The first time we went a mom in the waiting room told me just how much CSTherapy helped her daughter who had all sorts of problems from birth. She told me the first time she was ever able to hold her daughter without her daughter being in distress was after CS Therapy. I remember her telling me that John Upledger was “God” to her. Her words motivated me to give this a good try, but as I said, I can’t call it a definitive success for us…probably because DS didn’t allow it to be.
What DO did you go to, and did they recommend the Upledger Institute? There are some therapists that do CS that are not connected with the institute, but I think they were all trained there.
Lori