Falls and Injuries: The Role of Craniosacral Therapy

Fall and Injuries: The role of Craniosacral Therapy.

Which of us has made it so far through this winter without falling? – not me – for one.   Whether we slip on the ice while getting out of the car, or walking the dog, or take a tumble on the ski slopes.  Depending on how we fall, and our age and fitness these events can have varying and sometimes lasting impacts.

The job of a craniosacral therapist such as myself is to ensure that after a fall or injury, the body is restored to a state of optimal physical balance and function.  The main way this is done is by ensuring that healthy, balanced motion is restored to all injured joints and indeed to the whole body.  This includes restoring the subtle types of motion that occur on a cellular level as well as the larger range of motion of a joint.  Restoring healthy motion ensures good blood supply and drainage to and from the injured site, and, of course, good fluid exchange in all parts of the body is vital for healing.

The body is deeply interconnected in all sorts of ways, so a restriction of motion in one area can have knock-on effects elsewhere in the body, which means that another part of my job is to feel with my hands where this ripple effect has impacted the body and release those areas too.  For example, a fall on the backside will surely make the low back and sacrum feel sore, but often the reverberations of that fall can be felt as far north as the top of the neck and head.  Down the road this can potentially lead to further symptoms including headaches or neck pain.  Recently, for example, I have had a number of patients who have slipped on the ice and even though there was no impact to the head or neck, the whiplash effect of a sudden fall on the rest of the back and head has lead to symptoms of concussion which didn’t appear for a number of days.

So, even purely as a preventative, and once you’ve checked with your physician to make sure that there’s nothing that requires emergency treatment –  it makes sense to get yourself checked to get these issues resolved early on by a good practitioner.  This way you can avoid symptoms cropping up months or even years later.  Even if the initial pain and soreness subsides after a few days, of course, its natural to assume that everything is back to normal, which it may be. However, it’s still well worth a visit.

Having said all this its good to be reminded that we can have confidence in the body’s incredible capacity to heal (if it did not I’d be out of a job for a start).  What I’m doing in my treatment sessions is providing, with my hands, the right kind of support, to release the strain in the tissues thereby helping the body’s innate healing abilities to get to work.