Connected Paediatrics Weekly: I needed something easy

Hi Reader

Dad Joke: How do brains say hello? With a brain wave!

Song of the Week: Placebo - Every you every me

I have spent the last 2 days getting the final touches on the update for my Cranial Kinetics for Kids seminar and I want to give you, dear reader, a little sneak peak of what I am teaching this coming weekend in Amsterdam.

I wish I could take the credit for this little nugget, but it was shared with me by one of my many bosses (I have more bosses now than I ever have…figure that one out) Dr. Elise Hewitt, the fearless leader of the Logan Paediatric Masters programme. She came to my rescue and maybe I can pass the favour along to you.

I was looking for an understandable explanation of Cranial Rhythmic Impulse, how the cerebrospinal fluid pumps from skull to sacrum and back again that didn’t have to take the student/parent on a 5 hour epic of Traube-Herring-Mayer waves, the countless updates to the Monroe-Kellie doctrine or a 6 year degree in biomechanics.

Dr. Hewitt, as ever, looked up straight away and said…I know what you need.

The world needs more people like her…honestly…just brilliant

She steered me towards the elegance of John Upledger and his Pressurestat model. And this is how it goes…

Picture, dear student, the child’s head as a water balloon (it gets better I promise).

What Upledger proposed (and is being held up for the most part by modern assessment) is a system that involves CSF being created by the choroid plexi of the cranial ventricles. The CSF then makes its way through the ventricular system, into the brain. When it has finished giving nutrition and clearing out the muck left over from the glial cells it is then taken up by, amongst other structures, the sagittal sinus back into the venous supply.

However…

The system makes CSF faster than the brain loses it and so when the skull starts to expand from this extra fluid, receptors in the sagittal suture react to the stretch by shutting down the production centres. It gives a bit of time for the extra CSF to be drained out and as the sagittal suture compresses again it sends another signal off to the choroid to get busy again.

And there you go, you have a cranial expansion and contraction pump system that is entwined and supported by cardiovascular systolic pressure into the skull, respiration, fascial tension etc.

So easy…when you know how.

Chat soon,

Mike

Last seats available for Cranial Kinetics Seminar in Surrey, UK!