Unlock The Potential Of Cranial Sacral Therapy

Michael Morgan

I think it’s a pleasure to be here, Heather. Thank you.

Heather Sandison, ND

I think let’s start with just the nuts and bolts of CranioSacral Therapy. What is it?

Michael Morgan

Yes, it’s something that people always ask. They hear about it. They may have heard about it for the last few years. My mentor, Dr. John Upledger, in the mid-1970s, an osteopath developed a technique that came from the osteopathic tradition for a hundred years before listening to the body. How they would train a doctor to listen to the heartbeat or a nurse to listen to the respiratory rhythm. What he found, which was known for a while, but he codified it into a technique, is that even below the respiration, there’s a little slower rhythm of about six cycles per minute, 6 to 8 cycles per minute, and that’s called the craniosacral rhythm. The idea is, without getting overly technical, that there is the cerebrospinal fluid that flows from the head down to the sacrum, hence the name cranial for the head, sacrum for the sacrum, and the neural tube in the spine in between. This flow of cerebrospinal fluid interacts with the body, and it allows the bones to widen just a little bit in a very minuscule amount and narrow. We also feel the body going through what we call external and internal rotation. The efficacy of that is that if we can train a therapist to just quiet their touch a little bit and listen, they can listen to this very subtle rhythm of the body. The power behind that, Dr. Upledger says, is that it underlies the whole neuro-skeletal and muscular system.

It’s like there’s a very fine ripple effect in the body, but it affects all these systems that are grosser than all the musculature, the bones, and the neurology. What he did, he started experimenting with it and found out that when he taught even people who were laypeople how to do it, they started to get results. That’s why the basis of craniosacral therapy is physiological. It’s a hands-on technique, but it’s just a very light touch. If he’s experienced that, it’s a very light, subtle touch. But the body responds to it because it’s as if you’re listening to somebody. How does somebody sometimes say that you never listen to me? At least I’ve heard that. It’s like the most profound way to get somebody to a deep level—a deep neurological level. When people feel and when the body feels that it’s being respected and listened to, the body will start to shift and give things up. That’s a little bit of the basis of it in terms of the core, how developed it was, and how Dr. John Upledger helped train and create beginning and advanced courses. Around the world now, we’ve taught over 100,000 people, and we’re in 57 affiliates worldwide. It’s getting out there around the world.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes, this is an exciting time. When you say the word listen, I think some people think of listening with their ears. But I want to be clear here that this is listening with touch. It’s an attuned perception of movement in the body. When someone is at a macroscopic level to the naked eye, it looks like they’re still there.

Michael Morgan

Yes.

Heather Sandison, ND

I think some people also confuse this with massage. We just compare and contrast them. Craniosacral therapy is a hands-on therapy. But this is not massage therapy.

Michael Morgan

Although a lot of massage therapists learn how to do this. Yes, it’s like one of those buzzwords we use cranial listening in such a way you never think of how other people might receive it. Yes, there’s listening over the years, but also just placing on the body. We can listen to how the body moves; we can listen to the head; and we can feel this widening and narrowing. What’s interesting about this, Heather is that as we’re at this slide five-gram touch, it’s like lifting a nickel. It’s that light. What can happen is that, as you get more advanced in your work, it’s like you start to be drawn deeper into the structures of the body. You can feel and visualize how the heart is beating and where there’s restriction around an area where there’s something on the hand that might feel a little tight. As you get more advanced in the work, you can feel the structures of the brain. That’s different. Massage, which we all love, is that it’s working primarily on the musculature. A lot of therapists massage; they’re very keen on the muscles, and that’s good because you get relaxation in some people; they’re deeper in the massage; I call it in the Midwest, the Chicago type massage, where people go deep. They like that. Some people have lighter, but what it’s doing is focusing on the musculature, and you get better blood flow, you feel more relaxed, and most people intuitively understand that if you get a massage and you get that rubbing in that deep, you get more blood flow and you feel more relaxed. That’s very redefined. 

Now, the craniosacral is like a deeper level of that. It’s not working so much directly or deeply on the musculature, but just with that light touch, the body starts to respond and shift. There’s an old osteopathic principle that the body is a self-correcting mechanism. If you listen respectfully enough, even quietly, the body will start to shift and realign itself. The old-timey osteopath you’ll love this as an osteopath. They had the theory, even in the late 1800s, that the body had its natural pharmacy. If you could listen respectfully enough, the body could filter out, through its internal intelligence, how to heal itself. That was their thought. We’ve come full circle after 120 years or so, in a sense, saying that if we can listen to the body with a very light touch, that doesn’t look like a lot’s going on. It looks like a whole lot of nothing, honestly. But people can feel it internally in their bodies. For example, I saw someone yesterday that somebody brought to me, and they had insomnia, a pretty severe case of insomnia, where a fellow couldn’t sleep for four days in a row. I worked on him for an hour, and I thought even if I got my foot in the door after, he had like 11 documented concussions. I thought even if he got 5 minutes more sleep, that would be great. He went home that night in the early evening, slept for 2 hours, and then went to bed at about 11 and sat for four or five hours just, unabated. For him, that was huge because his body and his sympathetic tone were so tight that they never had the chance to slow down and reregulate, which is what we found, funnily enough, also with a lot of Alzheimer’s patients: their tone is so high, they can’t relax, they’re agitated. When you place that feeling in the body and allow that to settle, you get a much deeper parasympathetic tone where there’s rest and repair. Sorry, I could go on, but you started me going. But that’s like the idea of maybe how craniosacral is a little bit different than massage.

Heather Sandison, ND

Absolutely. I think there’s another component. I want to put this in the context of our modifiable risk factors when it comes to dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Michael Morgan

Yes.

Heather Sandison, ND

Also, anatomically, I want to just add that when we talk about the differences between massage and cranial psychotherapy, anatomically, what we’re doing is manually stimulating, with craniosacral therapy, the cranial and sacral roots, which are where the parasympathetic system lies. Physically, the cranial and sacral nerve roots are part of that rest, digest, and heal system, where the sympathetic nerves fight or flight freeze. When we manually bring people into that resting digestion-healing state, lo and behold, we get some healing that comes from that. Let’s dive into your specific research. I’d love to hear about how and what made you draw these connections between dementia and using craniosacral therapy.

Michael Morgan

For a lot of us, it started with our family because my sister-in-law and my stepmother developed Alzheimer’s. I’ve been teaching cranial for a while. I knew it helped with closed head injuries, headaches and migraines, digestive, and lower back pain, and a variety of other things. I thought, maybe, unfortunately, after they passed, I started to think about this; maybe craniosacral therapy.

can help with that. I started experimenting, and I found out through some friends of mine who were nurse practitioners at the University of Iowa. I said, Maybe let’s do a little study. There was something called a still point, which we teach even to laypeople. It’s a very simple way to listen to the cranial cycle rhythm and allow it to come to a very slow and even halt.

When it does that, it’s like a computer rebooting or resetting the switch on your furnace when it needs to reset. What that does is lower, especially if people have a high tone, a very low to a very balanced parasympathetic tone. So we did our first research project in Iowa. What we did was work on people who were early to mid-stage poor. Later, some of them had later-stage dementia, and we just worked on them for 5 to 10 minutes a day for six weeks in a row. We found out after we had fairly, all recent practitioners now have a lot of training, but they knew how to administer this point. We found out that after about three weeks, things started to change. They started to recognize their caregivers. They started to speak in complete sentences and feed themselves. We found this consistently, and years later, people, after some point, begin to catch themselves when they repeat. With someone with memory problems, a lot of times they just repeat over and over. It’s like what you have seen with closing entries as well. But they started to catch themselves, and they developed more and more self-awareness. 

We did that initial study, and then we started to replicate that anecdotally and then replicate that at the Upledger Institute. We found that if people have not just that initial treatment of a few minutes today but more profound touch, maybe what we call mini-intensive work—that we work on them for 2 hours, three days in a row with the team—that they begin to start to unwind, so to speak, the traumas from the past—someone who might be a 70 something might say, yes, this happened at 55, this happened at 40, and it’s not a linear process. But we found it out there: when people started to get this in a more concentrated way, all the traumas from the past started to dissolve, and they started to regain mental clarity. We’re looking at a program now. If we could do this regularly, we could start to dissolve things. I can talk about your program too in the metabolic think address for our aspect. But we found that’s what started to happen, and that was our initial research, and we’ve continued to do that. I’ll stop there for the moment, but that’s like a little bit of background.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes. I have to put this conversation in the context of the modifiable risk factors for dementia. The Lancet in 2020, published in a very prestigious journal out of the UK, published a commission report on Dimension Alzheimer’s, and they listed 12 or 13 modifiable risk factors when it comes to dementia. We can say, well if they’re risk factors, is there something causal happening? Those risk factors included things like sleep, as you mentioned. I don’t think sleep was even formally on the list, but they talk about it extensively in the paper. But we know that sleep plays a role. We know that stress and depression play a role. Traumatic brain injuries, which you already mentioned, working with somebody who has traumatic brain injuries and untreated toxic exposures like from either pollution or from cigarette smoke, and then also the list is long and essentially about don’t hear from you, like how can craniosacral help us reduce those risk factors?

Michael Morgan

Yes, and this is key as well. Thanks for bringing that up. Dr. Bredesen and I have talked about that in several interviews where we talk about the idea that Alzheimer’s is not a one-pill solution.   I think we’ve independently come to the same conclusion, but there are certain vectors, like five key vectors, that can contribute to Alzheimer’s as a risk factor. Let me just go through those quickly. Since you asked, what is an inflammatory process that can be built? Not exclusively, but that can have a lot to do with diet. Certain diets, as you well know, can be inflammatory, and that’s creating a problem in the body. Then, from time to time, that can overflow into the brain.

When you can create that relaxation response to craniosacral therapy and get more fluid flow in the body and also in the head by doing various cranial techniques, you get more fluid flow in the interstitial barrier in these vascular spaces in the brain. It complements what you’re doing with metabolic changes like the keto diet. We can talk about that too, but it allows the delivery of portions of nutrients in the brain to get there more effectively because it’s physical, but it’s on an extremely subtle level. It’s like 10 to 20 nanometers. It’s so small. In these spaces, there are a billion glial cells in the brain, a billion neurons, and about 400 miles of capillary supply. 

How do you get into that and release structures where inflammation has been brewing, so to speak, for decades? We don’t only want to address the current metabolic insults and ameliorate them; we want to get to the past and something that’s been preexisting. That’s one thing. This inflammation. Toxicity is another one. From our past summit, one of the ladies who wrote a book called Dirty Girl has a very clean liver. But I think you know her.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes.

Michael Morgan

What she talked about when she went to Notre Dame, she was there after the whole cathedral burned, and all this lead poisoning was in the blast pattern. It developed; she developed some very severe reactions to toxic waste, and the cranial sacral is one. One of the things we feel is that part of the missing piece of craniosacral therapy is if you’re accumulating toxicity in the brain. Unfortunately, as you well know, some people, like I think one of the recent patients you’ve seen, have very high levels of lead. Usually, it’s mercury or aluminum. But this fellow hands out very high levels of lead. if you can palpate the brain and help this flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which is lower in people with dementia, the brain starts to dry up.

Then what you’re going to do is clear those toxins out of the brain. It’s like chelating on a natural level. There are other ways to chelate it, which is fine. But the beauty of it is that craniosacral therapy chelates at a level where the patient can handle it in such a way that he doesn’t get hold of them ahead of them. It helps, like that risk factor, ameliorate, in a very supportive way. That’s another one. Then you have, for example, you might have hormonal inequities,? You’re dealing with things like this: the basilar structure in the brain, the pituitary, which is in the center of it. You’re allowing more stretching and more room for the pituitary and clearing that area out. The hormonal balance is reestablished. We found that we find this even with kids with autism, where autism and Alzheimer’s to some degree marry each other in terms of the reaction to toxicity. there’s that. Then there’s cardiovascular, of course, like stroke and heart attack.

What you’re doing is lowering the sympathetic tone. With that, there’s less stress on the heart. There’s going to be somebody soon after this. Is it that she’s been going through chemotherapy? One aspect of chemo, which is unusual, is that her heartbeat is elevated, whereas, for her, she has a very low heartbeat. She’s concerned, and probably after the chemotherapy is over, that will start to balance out. But we’re seeing that the cranial system can help lower that as well. That’s another one. cardiovascular because you’re getting a more parasympathetic tone, you’re getting more opening of the arteries and veins, you’re getting a greater flow of whole blood, and you’re getting that influence.

Then finally, the last one, and there are others, but the last primary one is direct insults to the body like you find with football players. We work with a lot of NFL football players. Now we’re starting to realize we can also transfer that into soccer. Even non-professional athletics. What that can do is, there’s something, you’ve heard about, it’s called Chronic Traumatic Encephalitis, or CTE, which is this fellow I worked on the other day with the sleep had that because he also played football and there’s like micro pockets of inflammation, hundreds of millions of those that get set up in the brain and the brain gets aggravated. That inflammation, and Dr. Upledger and I were talking about this a couple of years ago. When you have inflammation and plaque in the brain, that becomes very problematic. If you can also, because you’re reducing blood flow and increasing the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, you’re lowering the inflammatory response. 

Those are some key factors that need to be addressed. The thing is, one size doesn’t necessarily fit all because when we’re listening with our hands, again, that’s listening. But with the hands, we can find out which complements are present while you’re doing the blood titers and extensive testing. Through blood testing, we can feel and dialog with our client and find out which one of those is more present. Maybe it’s 50% inflammation and 40% traumatic, injury, or direct; maybe it’s 10% hormonal, but we can custom-fit each person to see how the recovery is, and we do that. Yes, I’m sorry I got carried away, but, like, those are just some of the areas we talk about in terms of those risk factors.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes, I love it. I think that we share this, and for a lot of people, I think it makes it feel overwhelming. There are a lot of these risk factors that are very well established from international and conventional perspectives. It’s this laundry list of things that seem all interrelated. Traumatic brain injuries and diabetes. They’re all over the place and like what’s going on here? But reticence, approaching it, organizing, eases us, and it feels like a sophisticated way to say, Okay, what are all of these imbalances? How can we make a list? Has 36 holes in the roof. Can we systematically go through a list of things that might be negatively impacting my brain so I can start checking the boxes? 

What I love about craniosacral therapy is that it helps us check a bunch of boxes. It amplifies the good stuff. It helps us detoxify it. It reduces this perception of stress by engaging the parasympathetic system. It helps us to increase blood flow, which can help us get more resources to the cells that need it to heal and repair. This can be one of those things. The other thing is that it’s delightful to receive. This is something that people look forward to getting. Can you describe what? We talked about the similarities with massage and how massage therapists sometimes do this. But what is occurring for people who have never experienced a craniosacral session? What is it like?

Michael Morgan

This is probably where you’ll find the baseline. No matter who it is, you’ll be relaxed. A lot of guys just fall asleep, and the relaxation is primary. That’s why I think it’s so useful to mention people who have agitation; they just feel more relaxed, wake up, and swear, I haven’t been asleep. You’ll see them just going to a very deep, parasympathetic tone, just very deep and relaxed. that will shift. Then I want to add one thing to all of those risk factors. Sometimes there’s an emotional component. I hope that’s not a shock, but craniosacral trains advanced therapists to work in a very safe way if they’re open. It creates a lot of safety for anything that’s on an emotional basis to start to be released and for people to be complete. 

Sometimes, excuse me, the emotional process is 10% of the picture; sometimes it’s 90%. But if somebody has a way that they could feel they could let something out that never got a chance to release, then it changes their lives in an even more life-changing way. I work for someone. The other day I was teaching a class, and we were teaching people how to relieve stressors like an arm that got stuck. She re-experienced the accident, but she was like witnessing it, showing it. Then she felt all that energy flow out of her arm in the same way it went out. You may be just very passive and quiet at the table. You don’t feel very much. We feel relaxed to something on the other range, or it’s like, something got released that I’ve been hanging on to for the last 40 years, and anything in between. 

Now people with Alzheimer’s dementia, they’ve come to us often with a lifetime of accumulated stressors. They may not even know. For them and because it’s so gradual, and I’ll address the normal experience too, but with people with memory issues, the first thing I feel is just a little relaxation, then another treatment a little more, and then another treatment a little more. Then, as that starts to reorganize the brain’s cognitive function, they become more aware. If you’re agitated, you’re not going to think as well. You’re not going to remember when you’re under pressure. But if that lowers, all of a sudden they start to notice things. Things start to work better in their brains because there’s more flow and there’s less baseline agitation. 

For people, that just means relaxation. What’s interesting is that a trained therapist will listen. in that neural skeletal structure of the neuropsychologist’s structure, the muscular structure of the body, all those memories in there. Sometimes we can feel in the body, what’s there, some tightness. Then, if it’s appropriate, all that starts to come out, and we’ll find out: did this happen? What about this cycle? What about this hip? What about the shoulder? It’s stored in there. We call it an energy cyst. But if we can use these simple techniques to relax tightness in the body, it starts to come out. The memory might come out, but then it’s complete when it’s done, and people feel like they like this release. Generally, the experience is relaxation, followed by something that can even be the release of older issues, followed by something where even the clarity of thinking and memory starts to increase as well.

Heather Sandison, ND

I just said it’s very practical, almost logistical. Someone walks in, and they stay dressed. They’re usually on a massage table? They’re going to be face-up. You don’t have to. I think some people think about those face-cradle things.

Michael Morgan

Yes.

Heather Sandison, ND

You go in, and that feels uncomfortable, and their sinuses get all clogged up. You’re lying on your back with your hair on your back and your face up, and you’re on a massage table, and you can get comfortable. If you need pillows under your knees. In a typical session that you do, it lasts. How long?

Michael Morgan

About an hour? 

Heather Sandison, ND

You’d be lying there for about an hour. You’ll get a good feeling from my experience when I received craniosacral. I feel relaxed but still alert. I don’t feel exhausted unless I’m probably depleted.

Michael Morgan

You just lost your sound, Heather.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes. I know.

Michael Morgan

We just lost your sound. Was it mine?

Heather Sandison, ND

I am not 100% sure. Is there anything else that you want people to understand about a typical craniosacral treatment?

Michael Morgan

Yes, as we were saying, you’re laying, like I said, fully clothed. You’re relaxed, and you’re feeling the therapist’s hands. Just feel your body at various parts of the listening station. We’ll work on the head. We’ll do something called a still point, where we’ll spend a few minutes at the head or some at the feet. Again, we’re listening to different parts of the body with our hands, one hand usually below the body and the other above. We’re releasing any restrictions that are called diaphragm releases. You’ll see us work on different parts of the body; maybe I’ll ask you some questions. Some people are asleep, and that’s fine. It’s completely quiet. Sometimes we’ll chit chat a little bit, but in our hour of the session, which usually goes very quickly, people will get up and they’ll rewind for a little bit, and they go like, I feel more relaxed. This was good. That’s typically what they’ll say. Then they might ask about some accidentally, some memory that has come back sometimes, sometimes about something else that’s been resolved, but it’s generally, I think as you’ve experienced, a very relaxing experience like that.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes. My personal experience was that when I was in college and undergrad, I had issues with my jaw. I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t put a toothbrush even between my mouths. I couldn’t; I was having trouble eating at one point. I was losing weight and was feeling quite panicked. I had gone to see acupuncture and the medical doctors, and I had gone to massage. Any of the psychologists, pretty much anybody who sees me, who would see me at the dentist, of course, I had signed up with and tried everything. This is about 18 months. I finally found a very well-trained craniosacral therapist. Within an hour, I was 80% better. I was able to do it minimally again. Then I saw her for 12 sessions, which is what she recommended. I didn’t have another issue until after having my child, after going through pregnancy and delivery. Then I went back to her, and I had a few sessions, and I was good as gold again, and so craniosacral for me at a very structured oral level is helpful when no one else was able to help me. I, of course, dug into this when I was in a naturopathic school. Even though it’s not my area of expertise these days, I have a huge appreciation and reverence for craniosacral therapy. I want to talk next about how you see craniosacral therapy complementing the senior living experience in treatment centers or memory care centers.

Michael Morgan

Yes. I want to give a shout-out to you for what you’re doing in your care centers because you’re getting some very profound results. It’s very exciting. It’s like you’re reinventing nursing homes, or, for lack of a better word, independent living or assisted living. That’s very profound. What you’re doing.

Heather Sandison, ND

Hopefully, that will turn into memory recovery.

Michael Morgan

Yes, there you go. Memory recovery is a different way of framing things. One thing about your experience with your jaw is that you mentioned that craniosacral therapists are trained in understanding anatomical connections. The jaw is where everything where stress ends up in the reticular activating system; we hold it in our jaw. That’s sometimes a reflection of tension, and it’s just built up. When you release that, the whole body—the head, the spine, and the sacrum—starts to relax. That’s another example from your experience; that’s an example of how things in the structure begin to downshift and get more relaxed. The jaws are key. It’s like the last train on the stage and out of the country. That’s the place where things show up. When you get that released and TMJ is a very popular one to work with, that’s profound. You say it’s about memory care. What was your question about memory care again?

Heather Sandison, ND

Again, I want to know your vision. We’ve discussed this a little bit, but I want our audience to hear how you see craniosacral therapy being incorporated into senior living environments.

Michael Morgan

Yes, I like to think that 10 or 15 years from now, along with what you’re doing, this will be like the standard of care. You have someone come in, and they have a memory problem. What we do in our interview process is get a sense of where they are on the spectrum of Alzheimer’s, so to speak, whether there may be cognitive decline is subjective, whether they’re early, mid, or late stage, like Dr. Bredesen said that’s usually even further on. We get an idea of where they’re on the spectrum, and then when we’re treating, we’re getting an idea of the tension in their body, where they are, what area they are in, and whether they’re verbal or not. Then what we can do is, in a very simple way, even train staff, as we did in our initial approach, to work 10 to 15 minutes a day on them and get them downregulated. As sundowners, people wander a little bit late in the day. We want to see if that can help downshift and get them to comp or state, and even if they want a day pass or even every other day, that is going to help if people have the time and the facility to administer them. Then, over and above that, from time to time, if we could, we could do more of these intensive programs, for we’re not just working an hour, but two hours, have several therapists there and start to work on them maybe once a year like that or twice, three, or four times a year.

What we’re interested in doing in researching with folks like you is saying, okay, if they have applied dietary changes like the keto diet and their endocytosis, we can see how much that change we can build on top of that, to see how much more of a range of improvement they have in some people and respond better to treatment than others as it is with diet. We want to look at that section and say, How much more can we bring to those people so they’re more receptive to what you’re introducing as a metabolic change? We think that will create the standard. You and I have both been saying this, but what I’ve been bold enough to say as we developed is, first of all, is there a possibility of slowing the progression? That’s number one. Because it’s usually done in stages in the body. Secondly, we want to see if we can stop the progression. That’s a huge thing in and of itself. Then, thirdly, can we reverse, depending on how much damage there’s been, stem cells from the sternum to the end, for example? That’s a whole other advanced thing we do. But can we see how much we can reverse it? The other thing we found in our research is that people have some maintenance programs they want to follow. We found this also with autism: if we introduce this program and they have some regularity of maintenance after, then they will maintain that quality of life, which I think is very similar to your approach. 

That’s the idea. We think we can blend it like the missing piece and use that very light manual touch to help augment what we’re doing with the diet and other changes as well. Herbal changes, whatever approaches we’re using to do that. I think teams of people get the help that we need, and our idea is to change the trajectory of Alzheimer’s, which I thought I’d invented, maybe Dale said out in the first place. But it’s the idea that if you look at people over a 20-year continuum, there may be a late stage. that’s been building for maybe 18 years. What we want to do is say that if we can catch them at an earlier stage, then we can change the outcome. I’m saying that even at the 20% of the world population we can introduce and change, we might save 20% of the deaths where it doesn’t even have to be end stage. We want to see if we can identify earlier stages, which you’re all about as well, and then apply this. But at whatever stage we feel that we can achieve some degree of improvement, and that’s all about our ongoing research wanting to do it. That’s my vision of how we can adjust this, or rather introduce this into care and a senior care environment.

Heather Sandison, ND

At scale, yes. This idea of stacking interventions. If we have a great diet, good exercise habits, and social interaction, we’ve got supplements—maybe hormones, detox, or whatever else—the other pieces of functional medicine on board. Then we add the craniosacral, how much more benefit can we get? How many more people can be helped? I love the concept that it’s not going to be a one-pill, one-intervention solution. It is going to be about stacking these beneficial things. One of the pieces about cranial sacral that I appreciate, particularly with an elderly population, is that there’s almost zero downside. It becomes the labor rate. This someone has someone skilled who needs to be available to do it, but it’s such a light touch. You’re not going to get hurt, and you’re not blind. It’s very unlikely that anyone is going to suffer because of this rate. If anything, it’s going to be tough, which I think we all intuitively know. We’re social creatures, and we benefit from touch. The bottleneck becomes getting people to show up and provide this. That you’ve been involved in training for a long time. I want people to understand how they can learn more from you or be trained to do this, to provide this may be to a loved one, especially if they’re a caregiver or a care partner, and then also where they might be able to find out more just generally about what you have to offer.

Michael Morgan

Yes, my website is preventingalzheimers.com. You can go to the website and see some interviews that I’ve done and also resources that we’ve developed with our summits. We can both go back and forth with our summits, and we have several levels of training in modules. One is that we have a two-day class for laypeople called CranioSacral Therapy for Alzheimer’s, or CranioSacral Therapy for Longevity Applications for Alzheimer’s Dementia. It’s a two-day layperson training. They can learn that virtually. The caregivers can work on their loved ones at home, even between treatments. We hold those regularly just for people, even without any training to get an idea, that’s virtual. We’re doing one in a couple of months. We’re working on something that’s called CSLAD,  CranioSacral Therapy for Longevity: Applications for Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Then we have a course for more advanced CranioSacral Therapists after they’ve done three levels of training. The first three levels are called CranioSacral Therapy for Longevity and Reversal of the Aging Process. That’s a four-day course where you learn how to work with people with Alzheimer’s or Dementia. We want to keep people with complex medical conditions well, as well as teach them how to work with multiple hands. What we’re doing now, based on the response from our last summit, which was tremendous, thank you very much, is that we’re getting more and more certified longevity specialists. Some people are perennial psychotherapists, but they can learn more advanced applications from memory and cognition, especially.

Heather Sandison, ND

In my mind, I see this roving person who can go to each of the memory care locations or each of the senior living facilities. On Monday, they’re with a couple of them, and they treat as many people as they can. Then, on Tuesday, they go to the next one and treat as many people there as they can. There are lots of people getting the benefit of this skill that you’re helping.

Michael Morgan

That’s exactly what we want to do. All over and above that. That’s one layer because there are about 17,000 nursing homes in the United States. Even if we approach the first 2 to 3%, that will start to change. I feel for the whole industry. But over and above that, some people want to be healthy. We also want to train our therapists, certified longevity specialists, to help people maintain their good health and prevent disease. Then there’s a third aspect, which is that I did a summit on longevity at the World Summit last year that was all about Longevity and not just Alzheimer’s in 2022. We found that some of the leaders in that area were talking about what was called Aging In Place. There are a lot of people who don’t want to go into a facility. They want to age at home. But who’s going to serve those people? Who’s going to maintain them? We’re training our therapists to work in that area as well. Yes, so those are all different aspects. Preventingalzheimers.com is a good place to look to find out more. We’d love to share more with people about what we’re up to.

Heather Sandison, ND

Wonderful. Michael, it’s always a privilege and a pleasure always to connect with you and learn from you. I’m just so inspired by the work you’re doing and your dedication to helping people improve their lives at this later stage. Thank you.

Michael Morgan

Thank you. Thanks very much for having me.