Gillespie Approach–Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Transformations: Baby’s Distorted Head | Reflux | Colic | Stridor | CHARGE | Hydronephrosis
Hi. I’m Dr. Barry Gillespie. I have my practice in the King of Prussia Medical Center in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, the United States of America. Today we’re going to talk about some meaningful clinical experiences, and I’ll tell a few stories, and it’ll explain the power and the breadth of craniosacral fascial therapy.
In my career, I’ve written three books, and my first book was in 1999, Healing Your Child, and then I wrote the Gillespie Approach Training workbook and also the brain score book in 2010. What I found out was because we were creating and discovering so many new things, these books became outdated pretty quickly after a few years. I’d gone through all the publishing process, and it was a lot of work, and a lot of time, and I thought there had to be a better way. So what I strongly felt was that instead of actually writing a fourth book, my fourth book would be on the internet, and it would be on my website.
So if you go up to my home page, GillespieApproach.com, and look for Articles in the menu bar, under this you’ll see hundreds of posts where we actually made the discoveries and things I found in babies and I have a few guests people that also made discoveries. You can sort articles by clicking the Babies button. So we have about 250 posts right now, but they’re just going to increase over time. That is my new book.
Get Inspired by Gillespie Approach–Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Transformations in This Video
It’s kind of great in a way because I don’t have to go through the whole publishing routine, and I think it’s great for the user because anyone in the world who has a computer and internet can get on there and read it for free. Free being the key word. We have Google translates there where it could be translated into 60 languages, so we feel that our newborn work, our baby work, is a global situation, so in order to get that out to the world we have to have it available for everyone and have it in a book form with so many languages in the world just wasn’t working for me. So we’re happy to put it on the internet for free. So again, you would go to baby discoveries, it’s right on the top level of the home page.
Gillespie Approach–Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Transformations: Baby with Distorted Head Experiences Massive, Rapid Improvement with Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Treatments
The first story took place in Montana in the summer, August 2012, and we were giving a Gillespie Approach Training out there in Missoula, and we give our three-day Gillespie Approach Foundation Training and, after that, we had a three-day Gillespie Approach Infant Training. As it goes that first baby day I was at a table and I had four students with me, four students who had never touched an infant toddler and they were there to learn, and we had a really nice mom who brought her five-month-old, and his name is Corbin, to the training to be worked on. You can read Corbin’s story on the newsletter section of my website, it’s the winter 2013, a segment. You click on Corbin’s story and can read the whole story.
But basically he had a very distorted head, a very twisted head, his head was wasn’t symmetrical at all. His mother said he had a very tight twist in the neck and he couldn’t roll over at all and he had trouble crawling, and he had leg problems. He just had trouble moving around.
She had spoken to one of her massage therapy friends in Montana, and the friend recommended, “Why don’t you go to the Gillespie Approach Training, and you could have free treatment with Dr. Gillespie and his staff?” While I was thinking about it, and she really wanted to do that because someone had told her that her son would probably need a helmet to put over his head to straighten his head out. So the mother didn’t want to do the helmet, so she said let’s give this therapy a try. She was expecting that maybe over a series of months that the head might start to realign a little bit, and that was basically her expectation.
So we have Corbin on the table and I had two students, two brand new students, first baby they were working on. I had one doing CFT in the lower body and another one doing CFT in the upper body. I’m just holding Corbin’s head, and so I wasn’t doing any cranial work, I wasn’t really doing anything. I was just holding his head, supporting it, so he wouldn’t flop around. As I’m holding his head I’m talking to mom and making sure mom’s okay.
A little on the back story was that Corbin had never cried. He only cried once or twice in his life. So when we started the therapy he started getting angst and he started crying, and I looked at mom and we’re trying it, and we had some students giving her a hug and trying to comfort her. But while I was feeling his head I could feel the bones all shift as the two students were doing therapy in the fascial web, the cranial structures were all moving. I was like: “Wow, what’s this? This is different.”
When the session stopped, we had to wait a little while for Corbin to stop crying and mom hugged him a little bit. I had felt that the bones had shifted in his skull. But I didn’t say anything. So we do it again, we do the same technique again, and I got the two other new students—somebody doing the lower body, somebody doing the upper body, I’ll hold the head again like I’m just doing nothing, I’m supporting the head. We get into that session, and again the cranial bones are all shifting, and it looks like they’re more symmetrical. When we were done I was feeling his head, and it looked like a different head. It looked very much more symmetrical. This was within 10 minutes.
Now in the past, I’ve seen heads change shape, but I usually see the child every week, every other week. You might see that over a period of a month or two. But I’d never seen anything like this in 10 minutes.
So we really didn’t say anything. The mother, Corbin was crying and the mother gave him a hug and she left. We got an email or a text a little bit later that day, she had taken him out to the car and she looked at his head and she said, “Gee, his head looks different.” She felt his head and she said his head is more symmetrical. She said, “That can’t be,” because the head is a solid structure, it just doesn’t move like that. It just can’t do that. But she kept feeling, and she was out in her car for 15 minutes just looking at him and just trying to figure out what the heck happened inside. His head did change positions.
So she drove over to her mother’s house, she walks in, her mother says, the first thing the mother said: “What happened to his head? His head looks different.” So the mother puts her hands on his head, and it did change. The mother emailed us and she came in the next day and the day after that. Corbin got more therapy.
Basically the bottom line is his stiff neck freed up so he could twist his head and he rolled over that day and he started crawling and he started moving. He started moving. Basically, he was tight, his whole craniosacral fascial system was tight, and we loosened it, we helped to loosen up over a period of three morning sessions over the course of the training.
So she was thrilled and her only complaint was he was too wiggling now, now she had to chase him all over the place because he didn’t move much before and now he was really moving. So it was a very exciting thing. It was very educational; it was a real eye-opener for me. It just told me how much the cranial structures are attached to this craniosacral fascial system. Even though I didn’t do any cranial work, just when this whole system started to get into play in therapy the bone started to move, the brain started to move, everything started to move.
I was taught with the chiropractors doing cranial in the 1970s, I was taught with the cranial osteopathy in the 1970s and early 1980s, that we had to do cranial, and I found out that you really don’t have to do that, at least in some cases. I was just amazed that I was in the same mindset that the head is kind of a solid structure, but even at a five-month-old everything started to move and shift and it was just a real eye-opener for me and for all the students.
Gillespie Approach–Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Transformations: Baby with CHARGE and Hydronephrosis Triumphs and Requires No Surgery After Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Treatments
The second story is about a young baby who had CHARGE, and if you’re not familiar with CHARGE please go to the home page and scroll down, and you’ll see the baby with CHARGE. The mother did a beautiful video about her child. I’m just going to take a little section of that video. The story is “A Baby’s Story.” The mother wrote out the whole story of what happened. It’s a beautiful story, but again I’m just going to take a little section of it.
So the mother had brought the baby to baby day out in Lancaster, where we saw our hundreds and hundreds of babies, and this baby was part of our baby day. I remember it was on the fifth visit, and I’m feeling for strain in the right eye. The baby had strain in the right eye, and I could trace it, it was pulling all the way down into her right kidney. There was tremendous amount of strain in her right kidney.
I just started getting into it, and this whole right lower quadrant just seized up and it was just so tight. Again, we’re talking about an infant, and that infant is crying. I mean, mama’s riding the bull, and we’re all there, just being present. But there’s just an ungodly stream going down into that kidney, and I’ve seen thousands of children before and I’d never felt strain like this going into this organ.
We took a break from that session, and we do a little bit more that morning. Again, strain went down into the right kidney and it was fierce. It wasn’t as much as that first time. Then we did another time, a third time, we went down from the eye, down into the kidney, and it was pulling in the kidney. But it was a little more normal here, but it was still pulling really hard. I remember going home after that session, and usually I go home very excited about all the discoveries we make at baby day with reflux and colic and stridor and all these different conditions. I was a little upset. I was questioned God, “How could a baby have so much strain in their body?” It just seemed surreal, it was unreal.
Before the mother left I went up to her and I said, “Gee, I’ve worked on a lot of kids over the years, but I’ve never seen strain like this going into the right kidney. You really need to go to a doctor to have that kidney checked out. There’s something going on in that kidney.”
So what she told me, she told me the back story, the back story was the week before she had taken the baby with her husband to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. For those of you outside of Philadelphia, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is ranked the No. 1 pediatric hospital in America. It’s usually one every year, but the top doctors in America are there. A urologist, a specialist, looked at this child, and they did a lot of testing, ultrasounds and whatever testing they did, and the urologist came out and said, “Your child has hydronephrosis.” The right kidney is three times as large as normal. It’s three times as big as the left kidney.
And the ureters, the tubes from the kidneys down into the bladder, they’re all twisted up like spaghetti. The ureters should run a straight line right from the kidneys right down into the bladder.
But in your child everything is all mixed up and it’s tight and it’s all twisted. He said, “Your baby’s young right now. We need to wait a few months. Your baby is probably going to need surgery. But again, too young, come back in a few months; come back a little bit later. We’ll do all the testing again and we’ll see what happens.” So I didn’t know this story.
So the mother says, “I can’t believe I went to probably the best hospital in America, they’d all assess, and they said there’s a problem here. Now I come to you folks, three massage therapists in an Amish basement with no electricity, no testing, and you’re telling me there’s a problem in the right kidney.” So at that moment she said, “I was sold before about this work, I’m totally sold right now.”
So she was good with it, she rode the bull as this child really worked through a lot of the strain. On the next visit, the sixth visit, it was less in there. In the seventh visit it kind of mitigating. It took three visits for this kidney’s strain to go away, but it was fierce.
So we finished therapy, I think it was about 12 or 13 visits, and about a month later the parents went down to the same kidney specialists at CHOP, and they do all the testing, the ultrasound, whatever testing they do, and they’re checking for renal reflux. The surgeon comes out and he’s kind of dumbfounded, he said: “We’ve looked at all the tests and everything’s normal. We can’t believe what we saw on the ultrasound and on all this testing.”
The right kidney, which was three times as large, was now the same size as the left, and the ureters that are all twisted like spaghetti, they’re straight now. They just go from the kidneys down into the bladder just like normally. He couldn’t understand it. “And your child doesn’t need surgery. You don’t need me anymore.” The parents were there dumbfounded, and I think the mother called me or emailed very, very quickly. She had to tell me the story, and I just sat there. On so many levels, I was grateful. It was kind of unbelievable. Because we were out there working on 500 babies, and we had no testing. We didn’t have electricity; we didn’t even have lights.
We were in an Amish basement, and they don’t have electricity. We had a little window where the light came in, and we had a table. That’s what we had. We were just following the body, but what I learned was that the fascia went into the organ, the fascia went into the kidney. It just didn’t go around the kidney; it went into every cell of the kidney and made that whole organ tight. When it got tight it must have gotten much larger to function. When that tightness in the organ went away, the kidney just went back to normal.
All that unwinding we did in the pelvis and then in the belly and this whole area and the lower back and the kidney, apparently, what that was doing was that it was working out the strain around the ureters, so that they become a less spaghetti-like, they become more normal. We were very excited with this therapy. We were especially excited because we had really no collaboration. All we know was that if you had colic, the colic got better, or if you had reflux or whatever disease we’re looking at, it got better. But we never had confirmation from the medical model like this.
The parents went to literally the best hospital in America. Doctor said there was a big problem, now there’s no problem, so we were excited. On another level, we were very grateful as this child didn’t have to have surgery. God knows what would have happened in surgery, the kidney’s three times as large, and what’s going to happen and what are they going to do. So we were excited about the power of the work, but we were also excited about what we felt that we possibly saved this child from a pretty extensive surgery.
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