Cranial Osteopathy
Devorah Steinecker, D.O.

Treating Children and Adults with Osteopathic and Functional Medicine Approaches

What is Cranial Osteopathy
An Osteopath is a licensed medical physician who is educated with a holistic approach to maximizing health with additional training In manipulative medicine. Osteopathic philosophy is based on four basic concepts: 

1. Structure and function are interdependent; 

2. All body systems are interrelated; 

3. Treatment must recognize and address the whole person, body, mind and spirit; 

4. The body has the innate capacity to heal itself and tends towards health.

In 1899, while studying to become a doctor of Osteopathy, William G. Sutherland was scrutinizing the temporal bones of a skull which had been disarticulated and mounted with each component separated but in correct relationship to each other.  Then as he describes it, "Like a blinding flash of light came the thought - beveled like the gills of a fish - indicating articular mobility." He spent the rest of his life pioneering what is called Cranial Osteopathy.  What he discovered is that the skull is a mobile mechanism, not a rigid container.  It's 29 bones have over 100 articulations with many kinds of joinery, not unlike the other joints in our body, e.g., dovetail, ball-and-socket and hinge joints.  This system provides for a minimal yet significant amount of movement. Sutherland's insight was that the brain and spinal cord, and its supportive structures (bones, cerebral spinal fluid and connective tissues) are in constant rhythmic motion, and that this motion is an essential feature of human health.  With gentle manipulative procedures the Osteopath can restore normal anatomic structure and physiologic motion.
Over twenty years ago during her medical school days, Dr. Steinecker had the good fortune to learn Cranial Osteopathy one on one from Dr. Thomas Schooley, an original student of Dr. Sutherland.