Cranial Osteopathy..does it make baby worse?

[lauren23]

Hi all!

My son is nearly 5 weeks old and yesterday we took him to see a cranial osteopath.

He's generally a very well behaved baby..quite content and a good night sleeper. He does struggle with wind, but is not inconsolable.

The reason we took him to the CO is because I had a very traumatic birth which resulted in an epidural and forceps being used. He was a big baby at 9lb 13 and he got stuck going 'round the bend'. I just wanted her to check him over to make sure we could lose any areas of pain he might have.

Anyway, last night he hardly slept at all. He woke up pretty much every hour and wanted a feed every time he woke.

I just feel like I've done completely the wrong thing by taking him to the CO. Is it possible that it could have made him worse? Or does it happen that they get worse before better?

Please help!!

Cranial osteopathy is quackery based on utterly rubbish pseudoscience, and has actually KILLED infants. Don't take your child back to a charlatan who profits from doing, at best, nothing good to children.

www.skepticalob.com/2011/02/infant-dies-after-craniosacral-therapy.html

We took our ds for CO when he was little as he had bad colic... It seriously didnt seem like the guy was doing much of anything he was incredibly gentle and yes for the first day he seemed a bit unsettled but then seemed to improve. I really believed he helped our ds. We only needed to go a few times. How is he now?

One word. Placebo.

The cranial osteopath did nothing.

Your baby is going through their own changes on their own.
Remember this tiny person knows nothing but you. Your smell, feel, touch.
They are unsettled because you're not there.
Snuggle, hold, snuggle, hold.

And you need to breathe.

Yes it is possible that it might have unsettled things and made it worse. When I had CO for my back it felt like I had been hit by a truck the next day! It was far more effective than standard "structural" osteopathy on me which is a shock as it feels like nothing during treatment. I am sure that your baby will have settled down by now but if not get back in touch with the therapist and get them to sort it out. Babies don't normally have reactions like this - they normally sleep more or poo a lot (if they haven't been doing this before). Make sure that the osteopath is on the GOSC register and check what training they have done in cranial work. Some osteopaths have done substantial study and others just a weekend course - so try to find out how experienced your person is. The Sutherland Society members tend to be experienced.

Womb the link you have posted is for Cranial Sacro Therapy which is not the same as Cranial Osteopathy. Osteopaths in the UK have their own act of parliament to protect their title. In the US, they tend to be trained medical doctors. Among other things Dr Amy Tuteur she seems to think that midwives are "deadly enablers" so I wouldn't personally use her as a reliable source of information on health matters.

I don't know about babies but I was in agony the night after my appointment with the oesteopath (he said I would be). Then the next day I was sooo much better it was marvellous.

DS was hell on earth the night after his first cranial osteopath session. I thought I had made a terrible mistake.

Within a week of the first session he stopped throwing up milk. With on the next three sessions he ate and held down solid food and he sat up for the first time ever.

Bloody weird placebo to have stopped an 8 month year old throwing up.

Hang on there and give your osteopath a ring.

Thank you so much everyone!! He's a lot better now..and does seem to get his wind up a lot quicker which is great! And he's back to his normal contented self..happy baby and happy mummy!!

An 8 month old sitting up and growing out of reflux is normal, so it happening around the same time you had CO sounds exactly like a placebo.

CO feel and "manipulate" special rhythms in the baby's head (eg. do nothing) so it's very unlikely to do any damage.

Genius! I love it when people make assumptions without knowing the whole story

I pethaps should have added, It didn't go entirely but has followed a distinct pattern ever since, we are now way past the age it goes by itself. Incredible improvement after a session six to eight weeks later. It's bad again. We go again and the situation improves again. Sometimes a quicker is necessary if there is poor health, growth or alterations in diet.

At four the reflux came back so bad that he had acid burn around his mouth. A couple of weekly sessions and the acid burn had gone.

That's one hell of a placebo effect!

Either way it has saved the nhs thousands

Glad DS is feeling better x

COs do acknowledge that it could possibly involve some placebo but if it works I am fine with that. The alternatives for reflux are bliddy awful. Glad all your babes are feeling better. CO didn't work too well for our chap but I think that may have been our poor choice of practitioner.

Placebo isn't a dirty word.

Cranial Osteopathy is complete quackery, based on ridiculous theories that are completely unsubstantiated. I could debunk it but Ben Goldacre does it so much better:

Cranial osteopathy
September 23rd, 2004 by Ben Goldacre
The Guardian

??Cranial osteopathy ?? aligning the plates of the skull.?? Sounds great. Maybe I can use it to treat my hangovers. The Times certainly likes it, and it even got Dr Toby Murcott to tell us how it works in a box, alongside a case study, called ??What??s the evidence??? Toby says: ??Can cranial osteopathy treat the brain? Cranial osteopathy is a gentle technique ?? practitioners claim to feel a subtle pulse in the fluid surrounding the brain. There is some research to suggest that these pulses are related to slow, regular changes in blood pressure in the brain. This has yet to gain wide acceptance and it??s not clear how working with these might lead to health improvements.?? Here??s what you need to know.

First, cranial osteopaths don??t even think the pulses are blood pressure; their theories revolve around the ??inherent rhythmic motility?? of the brain and spinal cord, mixed with breath and cardiac cycles, causing rhythmic fluctuation of the brain and surrounding fluid, which they think they can feel through the bones of your skull, and fix up with a bit of wiggling. They write long articles about actin and myosin (the things in muscle cells that make them move) being present in brain cells; unfortunately, they always forget to mention that brain cells lack the dense arrays of those filaments which are necessary to generate any significant movement.

But are there real ??cranial pulses?? to be felt, however they may be generated? It??s easy to find out: ask a couple of cranial osteopaths to write down the frequency of the pulses on the same person??s skull, and then see if they give the same answer. There have been five papers published doing just this, and in none of them did the osteopaths give similar answers. Which suggests to me that (a) this is not a reliable biological phenomenon, and (b) perhaps these cranial osteopaths are, er, imagining it. So: the discipline is based on a misunderstanding, they can??t measure what they claim to measure and work with, and there??s no evidence to say it works.

I take it that you haven't experienced a treatment yourself cote?!

Just read the comments in the Ben Goldacre post which are thought provoking. Large scale trials are the domain of big pharma rather than sole practicioners. I think that this Wiki is appropriate: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

I know what osteopathy is, and I fist visited an osteo after being thrown off a horse and landing on my head, and getting lots of stiff necks and bad headaches. I asked my GP first and he said give it a try, it may help. All the GP had done was prescribe painkillers.

The osteo examined me and commented that I had been a breech birth (I checked with mum, true) and restored mobility to the top three joints in the neck. I then found I could turn my head further and without stiffness and the headaches subsided.

He told me that he also treated babies and said the skull gets well squashed out of shape during birth, and they often get headaches but can't tell you, which seems fair enough.

I am very happy to believe that adjusting mis-aligned mechanical and working parts in any moving structure can help, whether it's a steam engine or a spine. I have no patience with laying on of hands or the 'fluence.

Osteopathy is not woo. Cranial osteopathy is woo. It is utter nonsense based on claims of "sensing" the rhythm of "pulses" in cranial fluid, magicking them to balance or something.

It is nothing like working your spine to restore mobility. There are no moving parts in the skull as in the skeleton, and it would be worrying if an adult were to actually pressure the plates in a baby's skull to move.

At 8 months I would take woo over a projectile vomiting baby (for whom all regular medicine had failed miserably) any day of the week.

"I would take woo over a projectile vomiting baby"

You didn't have to take woo. You could have just waited a few more days and the gastroenteritis would have passed on its own. As it no doubt did.

Please reread my other message above

Sorry I just reread that was a 8 month dose of gastroenteritis then?

[Facepalm]

Where does gastroenteritis come into it? I'm lost now....