Spring 2003

Cranial work does not lend itself well to modern scientific enquiry - in fact some people are furiously hostile to it as a result. I have always been fascinated by strongly-held prejudice and often wonder how it might have developed. As an example Brid Hehir stated in an article titled Head Cases distributed in Spiked Online 1 and Midwives: CST advocates believe that scientific proof of efficacy should not be required for alternative therapies - suggesting instead that "positive patient outcomes as a result of CST should weigh greater than data from designed research protocols involving human subjects, as it is not possible to control all of the variables of such studies".

Well yes, my views exactly. If science has yet to develop methods which can reliably test CST then we will just have to rely on the facts of successful treatments in the meantime. It seems especially strange that ''positive patient outcomes'' is something to criticise as a means of assessing the efficacy of a health-care approach.