How Can Osteopathy Help?
The hallmark of competent osteopathic practice is the practitioner’s ability to palpate tissue tension, texture, and subtle motions.
The development of this palpatory skill takes time and distinguishes manual osteopathic practice from all other forms of manual therapy.
Osteopathy really focuses on treating the whole person as the person is viewed as one functional unit, where all the parts of the body are working together as one.
The primary goal of osteopathy is to restore the health of the individual by finding and addressing the underlying cause(s) of the symptom(s). Due to the interrelatedness of the body, sometimes the true cause of the symptom is located in a different place from the symptoms. Having a deep understanding of the interrelatedness of the body is one of the primary goals in osteopathy so that cause can be found, understood and safely, efficiently and effectively treated.
Who Can Benefit From Osteopathy?
Some common issues that osteopathy may be effective at finding the root cause of include:
- Acute or chronic pain (back, neck, foot, sciatica, etc)
- Improving mobility
- Head aches/migraines
- Whiplash
- Frozen shoulder
- TMJ dysfunction
- Recovery from surgical procedures
- Menstrual pain/cramping
- Plantar fascitis
- Carpal tunnel syndrome
- Digestive issues (heart burn/acid reflux, bloating, etc)
- Chronic ear infections
Osteopathic care is an efficient and effective solution in helping people return to health and to their normal activities.
Definition of Osteopathy
Osteopathy is a natural medicine that aims to restore the normal function of the body by treating the causes of pain and imbalance.
Manual osteopathy is a holistic system of healing that is hands on, non-invasive and focuses on working with the natural healing properties that are innate to each body.
The manual osteopathic practitioner will work on restoring health by realigning structures such as bones, organs, and soft tissues, as well as removing restrictions, so that fluids can flow freely and efficiently, providing the necessary means to heal and restore full function.
The Philosophy of Osteopathy
A Science and an Art
The philosophy of osteopathy is deeply rooted in the science of anatomy and understanding not only how all the parts work, but there is also great emphasis put on the interrelationships of all parts of the body. In other words how things work together and how one part can affect another part even if they are seemingly ‘far away’ from each other. Understanding these interrelationships is paramount in finding the cause of symptoms and treating them, not the symptoms.
Andrew Taylor Still (picture to the right) was an American medical doctor in the mid 19th century and after more than a decade of studying the human body, he developed 4 core principles:
Each structure in the body supports the body’s functions.
The natural flow of the body’s fluids – lymphatic, vascular and neurological – must be preserved and maintained.
The human body is the sum of its parts. Its physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive systems don’t work independently - they work in harmony.
When the body has no restrictions, it has the inherent ability to heal itself.
These 4 core principles guide the osteopathic manual practitioner to utilize manual therapeutic techniques to assess and treat the client in a safe and efficient way to unobstruct the natural self-healing properties of the human body. It is up to the osteopathic manual practitioner to utilize all that he has learned and observed in the search for the cause and find a way to restore the person back to a state of health.
