Craniosacral Therapy for Babies

How CST can help relieve stress from birth trauma, colic and more.

After realizing the moms in her mom-and-baby yoga classes were not aware of how helpful craniosacral therapy (CST) might be for their babies, Colette Crawford, RN, founder of Seattle Holistic Center, decided to become a craniosacral therapist. “Over 20 years ago there was this movement that made new moms aware of how this gentle therapy could help their babies, but five years ago the moms in my yoga classes were not raising their hands when I asked if they had heard of or tried craniosacral therapy with their babies.”

After referring infants and mothers to CST therapists for reasons such as birth trauma and colic, Crawford wanted to be able to offer this gentle, hands-on therapy herself. “I’ll put one hand under the back skull and one hand under the sacrum, and I’m just holding the baby’s “handles” (where the spinal membrane attaches to the bone) and we see the baby relax. Now the mother is relaxed, too; I’m treating the baby and the mother is treated, too,” Crawford says.

Beyond the deep level of relaxation that CST can provide, moms bring their infants and babies to craniosacral therapists for many reasons, including:

• Birth trauma, such as issues from a vacuum or forceps extraction or an emergency C-section
• Trouble with breastfeeding
• Constipation
• Gastrointestinal pain and acid reflux
• Colic
• Not sleeping well, including early days when day and night seem to be reversed for the infant
• Teething pain
• Head-shape issues
• Problems stemming from the birthing process
• Earaches
• Developmental delays

For example, Heather Islander, LMP, CST, MIT, a Seattle-based practitioner whose training includes pediatric CST, treated a baby who wasn’t walking at age 2.

“The temporal and parietal bones located on the top and side of the baby’s head were overlapped from a difficult birth. During birth, the bones of the head naturally override and then expand back out as part of the birth process, but this baby’s bones had been unable to expand out to the ideal neutral position," Islander says. "The areas of the brain that had been affected process proprioception and balance. We were able to gently unhook that override in that first session. The day after treatment, the baby started crawling backwards, and soon she was pulling herself up to stand. Three days after the session, she was taking steps without any assistance.”

While no one claims CST is a cure-all for every infant issue, CST practitioners note that when a baby has compression anywhere in the craniosacral system — from the head at the top of the spine to the sacrum at the base — this type of massage can alleviate that compression, leading to symptom alleviation. An example of this is when a baby has had a frenotomy to free up a tongue-tied tongue and ease breastfeeding issues. Sometimes the breastfeeding issues continue and parents seek out CST for their babies.

“Craniosacral therapy eases the tightness in the baby’s mouth, head and neck, leading to breastfeeding success. Birth also effects the alignment of the baby’s head and body. CST aligns the body structurally and gets all the systems working properly — eating, pooping, sleeping,” says Barbara Coon, LMT, an advanced CST therapist who practices in Seattle.

The stress behind a child having any problem at all combined with the stress of babyhood and parenthood can make craniosacral therapy a fit for the whole family. Often practitioners will treat a parent and the baby during the same appointment. “Often it’s the mother or the father that needs treatment; the baby is just fine,” Crawford says. She tells the story of a patient who said the only time his mind could turn off and he could relax was when he was on her massage table receiving CST.

This idea extends to the post-birth days after any type of birth, but especially if the birth process was traumatic birth. CST practitioner Coon likes to have the mother hold the baby while she is working on the baby’s head and often the mother will tell the baby’s birth story.

“It’s such a nourishing experience. What I find when the mother is telling the story, the baby will be pressing into my hands, teaching me and showing me what takes place in birth. I feel this incredible connection to the birthing process while the mother holds her baby in her arms.”


This article originally appeared on https://www.parentmap.com/article/craniosacral-therapy-for-babies and was written by Nancy Schatz Alton.

Baby’s Cells Can Manipulate Mom’s Body for Decades

An evolutionary approach may help scientists understand why mothers become genetic chimeras and how that affects their health

Mothers around the world say they feel like their children are still a part of them long after they've given birth. As it turns out, that is literally true. During pregnancy, cells from the fetus cross the placenta and enter the mother's body, where they can become part of her tissues.

This cellular invasion means that mothers carry unique genetic material from their children’s bodies, creating what biologists call a microchimera, named after the legendary beasts made of different animals. The phenomenon is widespread among mammals, and scientists have proposed a number of theories for how it affects the mother, from better wound healing to higher risk of cancer.

Now a team of biologists argues that to really understand what microchimerism does to moms, we need to figure out why it evolved in the first place.

“What we are hoping to do is not only provide an evolutionary framework for understanding how and why microchimerism came to be, but also to assess how this affects health,” says lead author Amy Boddy, a geneticist at Arizona State University.

Maternal-fetal conflict has its origins with the very first placental mammals millions of years ago. Over evolutionary time, the fetus has evolved to manipulate the mother's physiology and increase the transfer of resources like nutrition and heat to the developing child. The mother's body in turn has evolved countermeasures to prevent excessive resource flow.

Things get even more intriguing when fetal cells cross the placenta and enter the mother's bloodstream. Like stem cells, fetal cells are pluripotent, which means they can grow into many kinds of tissue. Once in the mother's blood, these cells circulate in the body and lodge themselves in tissue. They then use chemical cues from neighboring cells to grow into the same stuff as the surrounding tissue, Boddy says.

Although the mother's immune system typically removes unchanged fetal cells from the blood after pregnancy, the ones that have already integrated with maternal tissues escape detection and can remain in mom's body.

Microchimerism can get especially complex when a mother has multiple pregnancies. The mother's body accumulates cells from each baby—and potentially functions as a reservoir, transferring cells from the older sibling into the younger one and forming more elaborate microchimeras. The presence of fetal cells in the mother’s body could even regulate how soon she can get pregnant again.

“I think one promising area for further research concerns unexplained pregnancy losses, and whether older siblings, as genetic individuals, can play a role in delaying the birth of younger siblings,” says David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

Given all this complexity, microchimeras have been difficult to study until recently, the authors note in their paper, which will be published in an upcoming issue of BioEssays. The phenomenon was discovered several decades ago, when male DNA was detected in the bloodstream of a woman. But the technologies of the time couldn't get a detailed enough picture of the genetics to tease apart the minute cellular situation.

Now, deep-sequencing technologies allow researchers to identify the origin of DNA in a mother’ tissues more comprehensively by sampling many areas in the genome, including genes implicated in immunity. These genes are unique to an individual and thus can help differentiate a mother’s DNA from that of her children with greater precision.

“If the cell populations can be isolated, then modern techniques should allow the genetic individual of origin to be unambiguously identified,” says Haig.

Still, understanding how the fetal cells are interacting with maternal cells is going to be difficult, says Boddy. Little is understood about the cellular signaling that causes fetal cells to regulate maternal physiology.

“It’s likely a negotiation between the maternal body and the fetal cells, where there is an expectation in the maternal body of a certain level of microchimerism that it needs to function properly,” said Boddy. For example, previous experiments showed that when mouse fetal cells are exposed to lactation hormones in the lab, they take on similar attributes to those of mammary cells, hinting that breast tissue may be one hot spot for microchimerism.

“Normal, healthy lactation may be the consequence of the fetal cells signaling to the mother’s body to make milk,” says co-author Melissa Wilson Sayres, also at Arizona State. But previous work has also suggested that the same features that allow fetal cells to integrate into the mother’s tissues—like evading her immune system—also makes them similar to cancer cells, which could lead to greater cancer vulnerability in the mother.

Based on evolutionary reasoning, the authors predict that fetal cells should be found primarily in the tissues that play a role in transferring resources to the fetus. That includes the breast, where they may impact milk production; the thyroid, where they can affect metabolism and heat transfer to the baby; and the brain, where they may influence neural circuitry and maternal attachment to the child.

The next steps will be to use modern sequencing tools to go looking for fetal cells in these spots, and then begin studying how the cells are communicating in each region of mom's body.

“What is really interesting and novel about this work is putting the issue of microchimerism and maternal health into an evolutionary framework,” says Julienne Rutherford, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“If these fetal cells are interacting with maternal physiology, where in the maternal body would we expect the greatest effect on function? That’s been a big question mark. Putting this into an evolutionary context was incredibly clever and novel and very exciting. It’s a beautiful example of theory driving testable predictions."

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/babys-cells-can-manipulate-moms-body-decades-180956493/#W8497uuQ4lzRjs3d.99
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