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Osteopathy - What is Osteopathy?
Osteopathy is a distinct and holistic form of modern manual medicine. In Australia Osteopaths are university educated and must be registered withAHPRA.
An American ‘prairie doctor’ developed Osteopathy over 100 years ago, around the time of the American Civil War. Medicine at the time was very basic and Dr Still developed his system alongside conventional medicine. As medicine progressed over the years Osteopathy incorporated all these advancements. Osteopathic Medicine Drs in the USA are regular Drs with a small percentage still using their hands on approach.
In Australia,
Osteopaths use a purely “hands on approach” and do not prescribe drugs or perform surgery. Osteopaths are experts in using their hands to treat pain, injury, degenerative situations and dysfunction in the neuro-muscular -skeletal system.
An Osteopath trains extensively in anatomy, physiology, and biomechanics. They understand how the human body functions as a whole. When combined with clinical medicine, neurology, orthopaedics, and diagnosis, Osteopathy becomes a highly sophisticated form of therapy. Most Osteopaths treat acute or chronic musculoskeletal pain. Some also focus on obstetrics, paediatrics, sports medicine, or rehabilitation.
How is Osteopathy different?
Its all about
the touch and the information gathered that builds a picture of what is going on with the patient at that given moment in time that guides the Osteopaths’ hands. Each patient is unique. Osteopaths do not reduce them to a symptom with a pill or surgery as the answer—Osteopathy looks at the bigger picture. The relevance of intervention depends on how the neuro-musculoskeletal system is involved and on the factors that predispose the person to their symptoms.
How does an Osteopath determine what is wrong with me?
Its a process of information gathering involving History, Observation, Palpation and determining what is going on in terms of their whole body, physiology, mental state and biomechanics. Is it suitable for an Osteopath to intervene or do they need to be seeing someone else ie surgeon. If Osteopathy is appropriate then a treatment approach can be formulated. Your safety and recovery is the first priority.
History:
What has made you the person you are today? Trauma both physical and mental, Injuries, illnesses, surgeries, lifestyle, exercise, medication, investigations, previous treatments, ongoing medical treatment etc.
Observation: Osteopaths like to observe how you function at rest, how you breathe, speak, your posture, your body language and then how you move. Sometimes its only subtle clues we gain and other times the issue is blatantly obvious.
Palpation:
Is an Osteopaths’ point of difference. We spend hundreds of hours training the hands to feel and then thousands of hours in practice working towards mastery. An analogy being the violin or bagpipes, a novice will torture your ears yet a master can make the music come alive. The quality of that palpation, the sensing / detecting fingers read the patients body and can determine the quality of health, function, dysfunction and damage. The area of symptoms is examined but also the spine and where appropriate the associated organs and skull. Symptoms are not a good way of determining where a problem necessarily is.
The Osteopath gathers this information and then formulates a diagnosis and treatment approach.
How does an Osteopath treat me?
You could take 10 people complaining of low back pain of similar ages and presentations and an Osteopath might determine their symptoms are due to entirely different cumulative patterns and require entirely different treatment approaches. Everyone is unique, they have their own story and life experiences of how they arrived at the state they did. During my training many years ago, people described Osteopathy as a healing art firmly grounded in the medical sciences. That “healing art” form may look very different to that of Chiropractic, Physiotherapy or Medical manipulation and mastery of each takes a long time.
The aim
of treatment is to first try and get you out of pain or distress as fast as possible and then to improve how your body is functioning and then to rehabilitate you to try to prevent a return of symptoms. Treatment may take the form of soft tissue “massage” like applications, rythmical movement and gentle joint manipulation/ It might involve very subtle and almost unnoticeable cranial or balanced ligamentous tension techniques. The important thing is to do what is appropriate to get your body to respond and improve.