Question
Hey Dr. Gillman,

I'm in my first year of Chiropractic school and we are currently learning about all of the cranial nerves.  I know the symptoms of damage to each of the 12 cranial nerves, but we haven't been taught how to repair the damaged nerves.  I tried to google ways to treat the cranial nerves, but haven't been too successful in finding treatment methods.  Will we learn how to repair damaged cranial nerves later in school, and if you'd like to give an example of how a Chiropractor would treat a damaged cranial nerve I'd be greatly appreciative.

Thanks,

Jared Hayes

Answer
Jared,

We really do not treat damaged cranial nerves, and I hope your teachers aren't touting that we can.   We provide soft tissue therapy to cranial nerve regions outside of the boney cranium, e.g. the soft tissues that surround CN5 and CN7.  But do you really think we are going to "treat" a damaged cranial nerve?   We can provide a modality such as ice, heat, or low level laser to the exposed nerve that is outside of the cranium.  We can reduce adhesion formation to exposed terminal nerve zones such as temporal brances of CN5.  Do you really think we can get to CN1? or CN8?  Do you even think that any of our methods can "help" someone with Bells Palsy in any way?  Beware that there are lots of dogmatic clowns in our profession that will preach their methods of "balancing-out" or affecting cranial nerves and other such foolosophy.  It just is not so.  They will pray on naive students and doctors, so don't fall into their web.  WE don't repair CN's.   Hit the books and journals!

Dr. G'