Considering Osteopathy

4 Oct 2022

Want to refer Osteopathy but unsure how to tell friends who are only used to publicly funded medical services? 

Sometimes healing modalities such as Osteopathy can be a hard sell. We see this for many reasons. Osteopathy can be a challenging thing to explain to people and is certainly different compared to your mainstream medical options. In this short blog we explain that this healing art has actually been forwarded on by those in the same profession as your medical doctor which you likely did not know!

Here is a short bit of information that may help others consider this style of medical help.

Osteopathy was founded about 150 years ago by a doctor named Dr. Andrew Still. He had a desire to learn and incorporate other ways of helping people get better. In addition to that desire, he had lost members of his own family which I am sure fueled the need to add more skills to his medical tool belt. He was known to be great with skeletal work and set up the first school and came up with the term ‘Osteopathy’.

I am sure if Dr. Still was around today, he would have changed that title given the broad spectrum of dysfunctions, restrictions and ailments that manual osteopaths treat.  Since then, other doctors and medical researchers have added more healing modalities from different origins and specialties.  Many of the assessment and treatment skills in osteopathy were not invented by these professionals but they were studied, modified, measured and are still being translated into current day western medicine. Many schools of osteopathy are led by medical doctors and in the USA, the term Osteopath, strictly by itself, is a medical doctor whose specialty they chose is osteopathy. 

Any equipment that could measure changes in the body were used to demonstrate the efficiency of osteopathic treatment. This is very helpful to explain when clients are being treated with techniques nowhere near the pain source. For example, a famous manual osteopath used fluoroscopy to measure the position of the bladder after making a correction to the navicular bone in the foot.

Conclusion

So in short, many of the assessment and treatment skills in osteopathy have been studied, used professionally and passed down by doctors. As a client trying to help another consider this style of health options, knowing that this healing art has been forwarded on by those in the same profession as your medical doctor, can give others the confidence to explore a more hands-on approach to your health.

If you are curious about osteopathy and would like to book an appointment, Stewart Hope is taking new patients at Natural Choice Medical Clinic in Guelph.

Book HERE.

Stewart Hope, DOMP, Manual Osteopath