Modern Therapy for Osteopathy

In Britain over 5 million people a year visit an osteopath, many of them now referred by a doctor. In the United States, where osteopaths are also medically trained doctors, the figure is in excess of 100 million.

Osteopathy was devised in 1874 by Andrew Taylor Still. He trained as an engineer before receiving formal medical training at Kansas City School of Physicians and Surgeons, after which he worked as an army surgeon. He was unhappy with the often brutal medicine of his day, and he felt that stimulating the body's natural powers of self-healing would be preferable. He was interested in the body as a machine and became aware that many illnesses were the result of a misalignment of the body's structures. Manipulation could restore the balance and cure illness, he believed.

His philosophy was that "structure governs function," a belief that remains one of the basic principles of modern osteopathy. He claimed that tension in muscles and misaligned bones places unnecessary strain on the body as a whole. The initial strain can be caused by any number of factors, such as physical injury, or habitual poor posture, or by destructive emotions such as anxiety and fear. Adjusting the framework of the body would relieve that strain and enable all the systems to run smoothly so that the body would heal itself.

Modern Therapy

Osteopaths regard the body as a unit, a whole being made up of contributory parts. An abnormality in the structure or reaction of one part exerts an abnormal influence on all the other parts, which in turn affects the whole body. The normal, healthy body contain; within itself all the necessary mechanisms for its own defense against injury and infection, and for restoration to normality following trauma. This defense and restoration take place best if the body is maintained in optimum condition, when there is maximum structural mobility and flexibility.

Osteopathy is therefore aimed at encouraging the body's internal mechanisms to focus on their own self-corrective function on the imbalance. The osteopath's aim is to correct the dysfunction so that the body is then in a fit state to heal itself. Osteopathic treatment is concerned as much with maintenance as with cure. A regular checkup enables the osteopath to detect and restore areas of dysfunction before they manifest as disease.

Osteopathy employs a wide range of manipulative techniques, varying according to the part of the body being treated. Tight muscles will be relaxed in order that fluids may flow freely, allowing blood to carry nutrients and oxygen to where they are needed, and allowing the waste products in the lymphatic fluid to drain away. Some regions may require gentle, slow, low-velocity touch, while soft tissues and some joints may need flexing or massage. Joints with reduced mobility may require joint mobilization therapy. At all times, however, it is the entire body that is undergoing treatment. The local body area, which is subject to the presenting complaint, naturally receives close attention, but the osteopath also minutely examines the rest of the body for other factors that may predispose or contribute to the complaint.