Rating: 
Summary: Sub-titled "How to Pull a Fast One"
Review: A useful " how to" guide for those interested in inventing their own bogus therapy. Not a single shred of evidence for efficacy, and denies basic anatomical facts that easily demonstrable to the average 3rd grader.
Rating:
Summary: Sub-titled "How to Pull a Fast One"
Review: A useful " how to" guide for those interested in inventing their own bogus therapy. Not a single shred of evidence for efficacy, and denies basic anatomical facts that easily demonstrable to the average 3rd grader.
Rating: 
Summary: a very readable and helpful book
Review: being a freelance writer i need to keep up with health issues and i found this book not only readable but also helpful in explaining the link between the brain and physical/emotional health. my nephew who has attention deficit disorder is being treated using CST (craniosacral therapy) and has improved immensely,so the book helped his mother and i to apply and understand some of the techniques. i recommend this book especially for mothers with autistic children or children with learning disabilities.
Rating:
Summary: A Cruel Hoax
Review: Craniosacral therapy is a complete farce. There is no pulse to the spinal fluid that is not directly caused by the cardiovascular system, and skull bones are fused early in life, thus making any perceived shifting of them illusory. It's just another placebo ritual masquerading as science. The surest sign of that is the complete lack of hard scientific evidence (ie controlled double-blind studies) supporting it, and instead a reliance on testimonials such as those written here.The author actually thinks that individual cells in the body have an individual consciousness and can verbalize their "thoughts"! It would be funny were it not so sad, and were people with legitimate medical needs not wasting valuable time, energy and money on such nonsense.
Rating:
Summary: Self-Deception and Pseudoscience
Review: Dr. Upledger allowed himself to be fooled by an ideomotor phenomenon, similar to that which makes the Ouija board work. A recent review in Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine shows that different observers of the "craniosacral rhythm" don't even agree with each other about the frequency of the fluctuations they think they feel. The bones of the skull do not move, either; they are fused together. There is no acceptable evidence for any of these theories. I found the book interesting to read as a psychological study of self-deception, and for its general humor value. Among other things, he claims that a dolphin touching a therapist's back caused a change in leg length in a patient the therapist was touching; and he had one patient's husband fasten her to the kitchen sink drain with a long copper wire so she could get around the house while she was being "grounded" to get rid of excess energy. (Don't try this at home: it is potentially dangerous). I'm sure he means well, but he has let his imagination run away with him!
Rating:
Summary: Open minds
Review: Every single one of us has and owns a CranioSacral system. And the relaxation effect a CranioSacral session has on our bodies is unmistakable. As a craniosacral practitioner, I see many positive valuable benefits as a result of this therapy on a daily basis. It is based on some not so controversial osteopathic medical principles. There are numerous studies that have shown for many years now that the cranial bones do indeed move. But much like people believed the world was once flat, it took a long time for the general belief system to begin to change. In the future, I suspect Dr. Upledger will be applauded for his efforts and for honestly putting himself out there to be criticized for making an effort to break new ground and continue the research that began in the early 1900's. CranioSacral is based on fascial strain patterns in the body. Fascia is real. Strain patterns are real. They can be felt and perceived through touch. Touch has it's own language. Some people are more fluent in the language of touch than others. Anyone can develop that sense of touch, it just takes time and practice. You cannot describe touch in words. That is part of the challenge of proving something scientfically about human beings. We want everything explained to our left brain in a scientific manner, but that isn't where touch and emotion and humanity hangs out. In case you haven't noticed, there are infinite scientific studies about human beings that directly contradict one another. One study says one thing, and another will come out a couple months later and say the exact opposite. Why is that? Human beings are unique and can change from moment to moment. We are living, breathing, dynamic systems, not a fixed machine. Each person is different. So you really have to judge by results. This book introduces some of the basic concepts of craniosacral and somatoemotional release. The results of craniosacral and the many thousands of people who have benefited enormously speak for themselves. If you are interested in the process of how a touch therapy can literally help people heal themselves, then this book is for you. However, if you are interested in detailed scientific studies, facts, numbers, how many mice were tortured, etc. then look elsewhere. Actually you might be more interested in his first book CranioSacral Therapy. A result of the many years of research in the late 1970's at Michigan State University. Anyway, it's interesting to note and you might just get a little curious because any book that challenges people's belief system and causes people to respond with anger or fear, just might have something going for it.
Rating:
Summary: Open minds
Review: Every single one of us has and owns a CranioSacral system. And the relaxation effect a CranioSacral session has on our bodies is unmistakable. As a craniosacral practitioner, I see many positive valuable benefits as a result of this therapy on a daily basis. It is based on some not so controversial osteopathic medical principles. There are numerous studies that have shown for many years now that the cranial bones do indeed move. But much like people believed the world was once flat, it took a long time for the general belief system to begin to change. In the future, I suspect Dr. Upledger will be applauded for his efforts and for honestly putting himself out there to be criticized for making an effort to break new ground and continue the research that began in the early 1900's. CranioSacral is based on fascial strain patterns in the body. Fascia is real. Strain patterns are real. They can be felt and perceived through touch. Touch has it's own language. Some people are more fluent in the language of touch than others. Anyone can develop that sense of touch, it just takes time and practice. You cannot describe touch in words. That is part of the challenge of proving something scientfically about human beings. We want everything explained to our left brain in a scientific manner, but that isn't where touch and emotion and humanity hangs out. In case you haven't noticed, there are infinite scientific studies about human beings that directly contradict one another. One study says one thing, and another will come out a couple months later and say the exact opposite. Why is that? Human beings are unique and can change from moment to moment. We are living, breathing, dynamic systems, not a fixed machine. Each person is different. So you really have to judge by results. This book introduces some of the basic concepts of craniosacral and somatoemotional release. The results of craniosacral and the many thousands of people who have benefited enormously speak for themselves. If you are interested in the process of how a touch therapy can literally help people heal themselves, then this book is for you. However, if you are interested in detailed scientific studies, facts, numbers, how many mice were tortured, etc. then look elsewhere. Actually you might be more interested in his first book CranioSacral Therapy. A result of the many years of research in the late 1970's at Michigan State University. Anyway, it's interesting to note and you might just get a little curious because any book that challenges people's belief system and causes people to respond with anger or fear, just might have something going for it.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific! A must read for anyone with chronic physical pain.
Review: I have been in chronic pain for 1 1/2 years following a twisting fall down a flight of 8 concrete steps. I tried traditional medicine and medication, chiropractic, traditional swedish massage and nothing seemed to completely relieve the pain, although the chiropractic therapy did help to some degree. My family physician suggested I try myo-facial massage. It happened that the therapeutic massage therapist she recommended also was a practitioner of cranio-sacral therapy. I had never heard of cranio-sacral therapy and was doubtful. However, the therapist loaned me a copy of Dr. John Upledger's book and began this therapy method on me as an adjunct to the myo-facial massage . This combination of therapy has produced tremendous results. The book has also opened my eyes to a non-invasive, holistic type of therapy, cranio-sacral therapy, which can be extremely useful for a lot of problems people experience for which traditional medicine has failed or not provided complete results. The book is an easy read of a truly technical topic. It will provide much in the way of insight to anyone who reads it. I urge others to read it and to discuss its merits with your family physician and other medical practitioners. This is a book about a little known therapy which can produce astounding results! Well worth the time and money!
Rating: 
Summary: The results speak for themselves
Review: I've been a pianist for 30+ years (grandstudent of Claude Debussy); I've also spent 16 years in IT doing software development and technical training. My father is a retired physicist with a PhD from Cornell. So I have a fairly strong and broad background both in left and right brained endeavors. I admit I found parts of this book to be out there, but from my personal experiences I've learned you can't discount the results, and the cases studies you read in Inner Physician pretty much mirror my personal experiences with craniosacral. I just finished taking the Upledger CST 1 course, and none of the roughly 50 students in my class could dispute what we saw and experienced, watching other students and gauging our own health barometers. Some examples from before taking the class:
1. Meeting an autistic patient of a craniosacral therapist and not even realizing he was autistic because he was friendly and outgoing from the time I walked into the office. He once told my therapist he wouldn't be who he is today without her. This made me seriously question the definition of autism, and whether or not he really was autistic. But before craniosacral therapy, you had to practically hit him over the head with a 2x4 to get his attention.
2. My therapist held a sharecare weekend class, but during one of those days a child came in with an emergency - he'd been climbing and had fallen 5 feet on his head. We interrupted the class and before the therapist started working on him, she said: here, feel the back of his head. It felt flat! It was horrible! After working on him for about 10-15 minutes, she said here, feel this again. The back of his head was perfectly round, and smooth again.
One CST 1 experience:
An older student had fallen and broken her arm years ago. She had a plate holding her radius and ulna together, screwed through those bones. For whatever strange reason, it resulted in frozen shoulder and she couldn't raise her hand behind her, above her waist. The other hand went halfway up her back. After the instructor worked on her for awhile, she was able raise the hand almost as high as her good hand.
The next day, she gave a follow up. She still had good mobility, but another curious thing had happened. In the area where the plate was, she'd had a bruise (going on 10 years since the surgery). Other students had noticed it too, and the bruise was gone.
I myself did a test - I've been in pretty good shape with a multitude of modalities used together - chiropractic, rolfing, cranio work, etc. I stopped all of that months before the class to do a test; I'd seen benefits but wasn't sure what modalities were responsible for what improvements so I wanted to isolate craniosacral alone to gauge the results. I was in awful shape by the time I walked in that class - headache on the left side, left back pain, left side sciatica. I almost couldn't turn my head, probably down to 1/4 range of motion on the bad side. The instructor only worked on me one time for a demo; the rest of the time students worked on me and vice versa. After 4 days I was 90-95% better (it fluctuates - an old pain will come and go, a different one will come and go). I admit the results aren't staying 100% because I don't have a great mattress. But hey, we were students who'd done cranio work for 4 days. What do you expect? :)
And as to the craniosacral rhythm: the first day, 75% of our class felt something (me included, I couldn't tell what, but I felt something). By the next day, the whole class felt the rhythms and they got stronger as time passed, probably because the instructor and assistants worked on students who were in pretty bad shape. I realize in retrospect you won't feel a strong rhythm when there is fairly significant dysfunction. By the third day, we were practicing putting each other into stillpoint and waiting for the rhythm to kick back in. My partner and I felt me go into stillpoint, and we waited for awhile and suddenly my system gave a huge UMPH!!! As if to say: enough!! Let me go!! And we both yelped. We felt the same when I put her into stillpoint. So the comments about different practitioners feeling different things - when you have strong healthy craniosacral systems, that's not true, because we students were sync'ed up by day three. I CAN see that if you're trying to evaluate a dysfunctional craniosacral system, practitioners will say different things, but that's going to be based on their skill level. A newbie just won't be able to assess the amplitude and rate of the rhythm the way an experienced practitioner can. I certainly can't unless it's obvious, right now.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If I kept going this entry would be way too long. Everyone is entitled to their opinion which will be based on their beliefs, background, experiences, etc. I can't deny the results I've seen.
So why four stars? I guess that's the left brained part of me complaining about the out there parts. It can't get over thinking that someday traditional medical research and craniosacral research will merge, and we'll have a more complete picture - one that is more balanced, one that firmly bridges the left and right brained worlds.
Rating:
Summary: It's not the book, it's the therapy--and it is REAL!
Review: It really makes me angry when I see so called doctors and traditional experts saying something is quackery just by reading a book. I am the most suspicious person in the world, and I have had extensive cranial sacral therapy done on me. I can tell you that you absolutely feel like something is being done to you, your ears pop every time the system is challenged...when you are being worked on, you can feel how everything in your body is connected physically and emotionally. You skeptics out there, do yourself a favor, go to someone-either an osteopath physician, or a physical therapist who specializes in orthopedics and who has at least 20 years experience in their field, and have a couple treatments, and then come back to this board, and tell me that is is complete bull.
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