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Ralph Zuranski has been involved in the search for health
and optimal performance for most of his life. He was born three months
premature and only weighed 3 pounds 8 ounces. Premature babies offer
suffer many problems during their lifetimes. After searching for over 40
years, NeuroCranial Restructuring® has been one of the most beneficial
therapies Ralph has had the opportunity to experience.
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| When we discuss physical
medicine in, in our modern western society, the roots
actually go back to early days in China and as far as in
Greece and Rome. And the concepts that we have in this
lineage going from those ancient times up to our own are
rather simple. It’s a binary kind of relationship.
Either bones or muscles are out of place and tight and
painful or they’re in the midline and they’re good and
they feel good. It’s a **** or in situation. It’s rather
simplistic and yet it underlies physical medicine for
physical therapists, for massage therapists, for
chiropractors, for osteopaths, for naturopathic doctors,
for the medical doctors that specialize in physical
medicine, they are called physiatrists. For all of us,
it’s like that binary situation. Bones and muscles are
out or in. So, the way that we would work with bones
would be if they were out of place, we would devise
different techniques to push them back in.
And that’s how I was trained when I went through medical
school as well. And when I started in the practice I
started finding out that for many people it was a
short-term relationship. I would push the bones and we
released the muscles so they would go into place and two
or four weeks later, most of those people would return
and say, doctor, you did that very well. Would you
please do I again? Well, when I went to talk to my
instructors who were men with 40 or 50 years in medical
practice and asked them what I was doing wrong, for the
most part their conclusion wasn’t that I was doing
something wrong, it was instead that these patients were
chronically injured and that chronic injury was
preventing these people from being able to in the terms
hold an adjustment which meant that they would never get
well and it was my job to give them relief from pain and
to continue treating them again and again ad infinitum.
On and on and on.
Well, there was something about that
that bothered me. It was kind of like a bell going off
in my head, saying that what they told me was wrong. I
knew somewhere that there was a solution. I knew in my
heart there was a solution for these people and there
was a way that they could be made better. That they
weren’t really injured that much. It didn’t seem right
that a person with a reasonably minor car injury where
they sustained a whiplash in the neck that 10 and 20
years later, they would have still have headaches
virtually every day because of, you know, a situation
where they didn’t even sustain a broken bone.
Well, the conclusion of my findings is
what we call NeuroCranial Restructuring® and the way that
that idea developed is easier to talk about with a model
than it is just to use words. So, I brought along my
friend. This is not Igor, in fact it’s not poor Rorick.
It’s not even Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a plastic
skull. And, if you start looking at the skull, you can
see how complex the relationship of all the bones are.
And how much they interlock. Do you see the bone that is
colored with the red pen here and here? And when I turn
the head to the side, it’s here. When I turn the head
upside down, it goes all the way in from the heart path
in behind the nose and comes up against the back of the
head, the occipital. Do you see how complex all those
joints are?
Let me go further. That same bone is
here inside the head. This bone is called the sphenoid.
The sphenoid bone as you can see sits in the center of
the head. Virtually all the bones in the head are in
contact with that sphenoid bone. Anyone that says they
can move the skull in a way that’s going to last must be
changing this sphenoid bone. And it’s, as it is obvious
from showing you, you can’t get your hands on that
sphenoid bone. This bone is the most crucial part in
NeuroCranial Restructuring®. This is the key to how we
can change the entire body. What I found when I was
working with patients before and I would work with their
spine and other problems in their bodies and I would
work on individual bones in their back and in their
pelvis. The body kept reverting to type because that
function, the pain, the mobility, these were minor
considerations compared to these structures more
important jobs. The main thing that the spine is there
to do is to hold up your head. To your body, the most
important part of your body, even though you need your
heart and your bones and liver, in order to live, the
most important part of your body is your brain.
Remember, if you cut off your arm, you are still you. If
you cut off your head, you cease to exist.
So, just like a computer, your head
doesn’t want to jiggle. Have you ever tried to add up a
column of figures when you are riding your bicycle down
a stairway? You know that what you normally do is to
hold on. That’s about all you can do. You can’t really
think about anything else. You can’t multi-task like
that, like a modern-day computer. You can instead just
hold on. But, when you are sitting comfortably in your
chair and thinking, you can be listening to the TV, you
can be hearing people in the back of the house talking,
and meanwhile you can be reading a book and even
thinking about something else all at the same time
because you have a magnificent computer and it sits
inside. Your body wants to protect your brain. So, in
order to prevent it from jiggling, what we do is we
arrange the bones in our spine and pelvis into a
position that stabilizes the skull and that’s stability
requires the bones to not be in the mid-line most of the
time because the head is balancing on top of these two
balance points. These are known as the occipital
chondyles. And this, these two points are where your
neck meets your, your head. Sort of like my fingers,
okay? You are balancing on top of them. |
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Dr. Dean Howell discusses how NeuroCranial Restructuring® therapy works: Part 2 |
| If your head has slid forward because
you’ve been in an auto wreck, your neck needs to be
straighter in order to hold up that head. This is what
we call whiplash. If instead your head has slid back a
little bit so that it wants to roll this way, as if it
were on a teeter-totter, you see, then you get too much
neck curve. And most of the time, you will develop a
sway back as well. If your cheekbones are at slant and
your forehead is at a different slat or rotation, you
will start having a more difficult head to hold up, and
your spine will start to spiral. This we call scoliosis.
Are you starting to see the idea there? The idea is that
the lack of symmetry in your head creates these changes
in your spine and pelvis in order to hold up your head.
So the key becomes, how do you make lasting change in
the head? And the way we make a lasting change in the
head, because of the way these bones all interlock, is
to work on the sphenoid, because the sphenoid sits in
the center. So if we do something to move the head into
a different place, so just working with the forehead for
instance, those bones are not going to move into this
new position unless the sphenoid moves as well, yet we
cannot come into contact with the sphenoid except here
in the temple and here inside the mouth. Those are the
only places accessible from the outside. This means that
most cranial manipulation techniques are lucky to make
long-term changes in the head. And they require many
repetitions in order to get those lucky instances. But
with neuro-cranial restructuring, we use small balloons
that go through the nose, through here, and into the top
of the throat, and inflate them briefly, and that
balloon pushes on the sphenoid bone. And that moment is
what permits us to start by carefully calculating where
it should move, that allows us to slightly rock the
sphenoid in different directions. So that rocking
motion, when we harness the connective tissue inside the
head, **** other connective tissues in here are bunched
up like springs. And so when that sphenoid bone moves a
small amount, that connective tissue’s spring unleashes,
and the bones start returning towards their original
design. Because you see, being born and living our
lives, having dental work, playground accidents, car
wrecks, accidents and falls and beatings, these kinds of
situations tend to compress the head bones so that we
have a distortion in our skull structure and a
distortion in the connective tissue. So as we unlock the
sphenoid, that connective tissue, like a spring, starts
expanding and the head starts moving incrementally, a
step at a time, back toward its original design. And
that accumulation of all those movements are what we
create in the day-to-day actions of neuro-cranial
restructuring. After you consider the differences in the
concepts underlying neuro-cranial restructuring, when
you compare it to other physical medicines, the
differences between NCR®and most physical medicine
therapies should be obvious. What we do with
neuro-cranial restructuring is to unwind or unlock the
structures that have been damaged repetitively through
our lives by incrementally unlocking your structures and
letting your body return to its original state, we
optimize the function of the brain and the nervous
system, and return the bone structures to their
positions as they were designed to be in so that
flexibility, chronic muscle patterns, pains, these go
away without having to treat them as pains. We can treat
a wide variety of conditions. We can treat nervous
system problems, we treat mechanical problems of the
skull, so we can treat TMJ, breathing problems, double
vision, occlusion problems of the bite. As the head
shape optimizes, it gets simpler and simpler to hold up
the spine. So spinal growth problems like whiplash,
swayback, hunchback, scoliosis, those can all be
addressed as well, as these structures start to move
towards their optimal positions and the pelvis rotations
and twistings start to change, and this causes the leg
length to even out. It will take care of gait problems
as well. So many problems are addressed with a
conceptually simple therapy because we are right at the
core, right at the root of problems. This is one of
three things that you want to work with in order to
achieve optimal health. You need to work with your
structure and neuro-cranial restructuring to me is the
optimal technique to work with structure. But we also
need to work with biochemistry, so this has to do with
diets and lifestyle and helping correct vitamin
deficiencies with vitamins and minerals, that kind of
stuff. And finally, detoxification techniques so we want
to get rid of petro chemicals and heavy metals and
certainly bacteria and viruses and things as well. So
with those three items being taken care of, the
biochemistry, the detoxification, and the structure, you
have a firm tripod, a foundation for you to build your
health. So you see, to me just nutrition alone or just
structure alone, is not enough. We call neuro-cranial
restructuring the ultimate cranial therapy because this
is a physical medicine technique that deals with the
cause of your nervous system and muscular strength
conditions rather than just the effects. We are not
interested in just giving you relief. When we perform
NCR®on you, we want to gradually reverse the trend of
deterioration. We want to get rid of the effects of car
accidents and falls and beatings and the adverse
reactions to various other factors, and we can do that,
a step at a time by using the NCR®therapy techniques. So
conditions as diverse as headaches, insomnia and sleep
apnea to anxiety can all be treated with the same
individualized and very particular kind of therapy. This
is not a shotgun style therapy. We will not be able to
treat everyone the same way. Each day, each person’s
treatment is entirely customized. And because we work
with you in that individual way, we can bring you back
towards your structural and nervous system optimized
function. This is a wonderful opportunity for you, and
for me, it makes work fun. I love coming to work because
of the way we can help almost anybody that can come in
the door. I go to the shopping mall and all I see are
people that don’t feel good. And with NCR®, you do feel
good, and I think you should try it soon. |
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Dr. Dean Howell discusses NeuroCranial Restructuring®
therapy treatments Part 1 |
| When we are performing MCR therapy
there are a number of treatment sections that we would
typically perform on a patient. There is going to be a
spinal integration section, which will feature some deep
muscle work as well as some **** checking and working
with the low back, and then also doing some deep muscle
work in the upper back. These sections would normally be
performed by a massage therapist. Then later we will
have the patient turn over and I will show you some of
the work that I will be doing on my patients. Then we
will go further. Do some external cranial work and then
the most important parts of the therapy will be some
very specific testing and the treatments will be ****.
Now we are in the spinal integration phase and you can
see me working very deeply on parts of my model's low
back and buttocks. It is very important how this is done
because the therapist needs to be able to feel the
energy flowing between the different contact points in
the patient's back, so this is not a random therapy. As
this treatment accumulates, what happens is that we
start seeing more symmetry in the shape of the spine and
pelvis. We are very interested in how their legs and
hips track together so that we show a lot of symmetrical
movements as the skeleton moves into a more symmetrical
treatment position. Working on the pelvis is extremely
important because of all the connections between the
skeleton and the skull. From the pelvis to the skull
there is connective tissues that will go along with the
spine and go through the inside of the head so that
working on the head and the pelvis are sort of working
on opposite ends of a puppet with strings. Now you can
see me at this point working with deep muscle pressures
on my model's upper back because so many of these
muscles when they are tight will prevent the skull from
being able to change as we do external cranial work or
the more important internal cranial work. Remember all
of these treatments are designed to combine so that we
can move the innermost bone in the head, the **** bone,
because as the **** bone can be changed we get permanent
cumulative changes rather than more temporary changes of
trying to correct all of these other structures. |
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Dr. Dean Howell discusses NeuroCranial Restructuring®
therapy treatments Part 2 |
Now, as I work on my model and start
to put hands on both sides of the front and back because
there are muscles and connective tissue that run between
your front and back, and those need to be worked on too.
You see, most people think that they have a front and a
back, and they forget that between the front and back,
there's a middle. It's very important to work on the
middle if you're trying to get the entire structure to
become more symmetrical. As the structure becomes more
symmetrical, then the changes that need to be made in
the **** become more and more apparent. And when they're
made, the body moves into a new stable, symmetrical
pattern, and there's no reason to revert to the old
patterns that were visible in the past. This is an
advantage over most physical medicine techniques which
tend to have a person return week after week in the same
pattern that they've been in the past, and then get
temporary relief. See what we really need to do is to
make permanent change. And that can only be done an
increment at a time. So to create this incremental
change, we need to initially release the structures
through the spine and pelvis, and then as those release,
the head is easier to move, and then when we get the
deep bones in the head to move, especially that ****
bone that I previously mentioned, as that occurs, then
we get permanent change. Permanent, small, incremental
changes. Now you'll see me using my hands on the
forehead and at the base of the skull, pressing with
actually a lot of pressure to start to move the external
cranial bones so that when it comes time to use the
endonasal balloons, we need to use less and less
pressure to create all the changes that we're trying to
do. In the past, before we understood these things, we
would use much greater pressures on the head because we
weren't doing the appropriate preparation of the skull,
spine, and pelvis, and because we weren't using
assistants to help us position the patient in very
precise positions. So even though I'm using a large
pressure here, at times pressing with more than 50
pounds of pressure between my hands, for most people
this treatment feels good. And they really like this
part of it most of the time. That's another important
thing to realize about this therapy is that we do not
need expensive equipment. This work is mainly done with
the therapist's hands on a basic therapy table. Because
we were not at my home clinic for this demonstration, we
are using a simple massage table. As for the endonasal
work that we finish the treatment with, it's less than
$100.00 for all the equipment **** that we require. So
you see, what you're paying for with this therapy is the
expertise of the therapist, not the expensive equipment.
As my model's head gets to a more symmetrical position,
it becomes more apparent as to which muscles in the neck
and shoulder area need to be stretched and released so
that the changes in the skull will be easier to
accomplish. So you can see me stretching the
neck/shoulder area on the right and again on the left.
As you may note, I'm continually checking the left and
right sides, measuring the positions of the **** the
base of the head, the ears, the eyes, always trying to
enhance symmetry. Because we are also working on the
back, we must work on the front. And the front of your
spine is accessed through the abdomen. This is trickier
work, and work that I generally do myself rather than
have my therapist help, and you can see I'm pushing
deeply through the intestines and abdominal area,
pushing on the deep muscles of the spine where those
muscles come from the front spine, go through the
pelvis, and into the thigh. And as I release those
muscles, we will see changes in the position of the
pelvis and spine. And through the connective tissue from
the pelvis/spine area, we'll actually be making changes
in the head as well. Adding this work to NCR®which has
been done just since the spring of the year 2000, we've
had patients make great changes in their overall
digestive function and hormonal balances. I had one lady
that maintained that she lost 12 pounds just from having
these deep abdominal muscles released from their spasms
prior to the finish of the NCR®treatment each day. As
those areas are released, we can feel the changes in the
body energy patterns, and I continue working until those
energy patterns feel as if they have been evened out.
Then I'll have the patient stand up and start doing the
very specialized testing techniques used for
NeuroCranial Restructuring®
. This testing is called pro-perceptive testing because
it is a balance-oriented testing. This is not applied
kinesiology. As you can see, when I push and pull on
different parts of the model's body, sometimes she sways
and other times she doesn't. It is the mapping of those
gentle swaying motions that lets us determine where the
areas of instability are throughout her structure. Then
in a moment, when she gets on the table, we will
immobilize these unstable places by positioning her head
with a pillow today, and by having two helpers holding
her legs and pelvis, and then through the pro-perceptive
testing, I've already determined where to place the
balloon – whether to be in the right or the left nostril
– and where in the nose because there's three passages
inside each nostril to put the balloon. So we very
specifically decide where to inflate this balloon to
move the internal bones in the skull, the ****, and as
that bone changes, the head structure has been moved to
a new stable pattern, and then the rest of the system
will continue to change so that the spine and pelvis
change position as well. Then I will retest to make sure
that every area of the body now feels stable when I push
so that we don't see any of the swaying motions that we
saw before. When we see none of the swaying motions,
when we see the stability is there, we know treatment is
complete for the day, and then the patient can wait
until the next therapy session. |
Dr. Dean Howell sums up how NeuroCranial Restructuring®
therapy works |
| We call NeuroCranial Restructuring®
the ultimate cranial therapy because this is a physical
medicine technique that deals with the cause of your
nervous system and musculoskeletal conditions rather
than just the effects. We are not interested in just
giving you relief. When we perform NCR®on you, we want
to gradually reverse the trend of deterioration. We want
to get rid of the effects of car accidents and falls and
beatings and the adverse reactions to various other
factors, and we can do that a step at a time by using
the NCR®therapy techniques. So conditions as diverse as
headaches to sciatica and from sleep apnea to anxiety
can all be treated with the same individualized and very
particular kind of therapy. This is not a shotgun-style
therapy. We will not be able to treat everyone the same
way. Each day, each person's treatment, is entirely
customized. And because we work with you in that
individual way, we can bring you back towards your
structural and nervous system optimized function. This
is a wonderful opportunity for you. And for me, it makes
work fun. I love coming to work because of the way we
can help almost anybody that can come in the door. I go
to the shopping mall and all I see are people that do
not feel good. And with NCR®, you do feel good. And I
think you should try it soon. |
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