I am often faced with ‘interesting’ comments about my profession – loosely based around assumptions that relate to “dealing with bones” or “rolling patients around and making their joints crack”. For me, this cannot be further from the truth and I try hard to not show the despair that I feel when confronted with these comments.
I do not blame people for their thoughts or flippant comments, they do not mean to offend or look ignorant, in fact many use light hearted language and insinuate that I must be very strong to be able to manipulate people in the way they think a treatment happens. This is the main thought I lean towards to make my face behave – I have a difficulty not showing how I feel as soon as I feel it and I really don’t want to seem rude when I hear the same thing for the umpteenth time. How then do I go about challenging this issue when Osteopathy is not openly advertised by any affiliated organisation?
I blog – not as regularly as I intend and initially to enable me to get used to structured study following my hiatus from it after I qualified. I started blogging about conditions I had come across in the clinic as well as things that were prevalent in the press. Now I need to address the biggest issue I face and come to terms that it will be a long road to educate people which I must ensure I take one day at a time.
I recall in my first year of training we had to write an essay on what we thought Osteopathy was. Looking back, I had no truly clear idea and 5 years later I feel that I have actually got to grips with it. Back then it seemed a little magical – that a tutor could see and feel what we were attempting to do in our practical classes when we had little idea of the impact a small adjustment on a body could do. The different concepts of tensegrity, pivots and curves, muscle tone and function and everything that occurs in line with these were confusing and felt at odds with each other. The mass of information that is taught is overwhelming but now I know that each and every lecture and subject formed what Osteopathy is over the space of the 4 years training. The question therefore is, how do I turn 4 years of knowledge into a couple of sentences to explain what I do. The need to be concise is very definite so I don’t bore people and equally I need to be exact so as not to confuse or come across medically ignorant or even arrogant to that matter!
As a background to the information I need to draw from, the understanding of how Osteopathy was formulated is very important to me. AT Still, an American born in 1828 was convinced that the then allopathic approach to medicine was not conducive to the body’s need for free flow of blood and “nerve force”. After many challenging years, Still was able to set up a clinic and then a school to teach this new way of hands-on treatment, officially adopting the term Osteopathy in 1885. The pertinent point in my treatment is the free flow of fluids (blood and lymph) as well as the unencumbered transmission of nerve conduction which allows self-healing and the most important of all, relief from discomfort.
Osteopathy developed worldwide through the years and in the USA, developed as a quite different approach which incorporated the use of surgeries and drugs in the treatment plans. In the rest of the world, Osteopathy remained an “alternative therapy” which I think was where the reputation of the profession received it’s most damage.
Osteopaths were only “alternative” because drugs are not used. We now receive very similar training to NHS doctors and must know as much as them about how to diagnose conditions in case we come across something that needs onward referral. Simply put – if your back hurts it may be a simple muscle strain, it could be a kidney infection, it could be worse. If Osteopaths just treated you for back pain and didn’t screen you for anything else, our duty of care to you would essentially not exist and we’d be no better than someone from the street rubbing you with ointment! I do wonder if Osteopaths have been corralled into the category of ‘bone crunchers’ by the simple use of the term Osteo (meaning bone). I am sure Mr Still would not have agreed to the term if he knew how it would be misconstrued!
Just in those few paragraphs above is a snippet of information about what Osteopathy is and far too much to explain to someone on the street or in the chippy that asks what you do. I haven’t even touched on styles of treatment so let’s get onto that.
There are many forms of treatment style and none of them are truly unique to Osteopathy. We have the simple use of massage, effleurage, stretching (isometric etc) and trigger point work. The use of high velocity, low amplitude thrusts (HVT) are common with Osteopathy but more common with Chiropractic practitioners (these are the movements that make the audible clicking sounds). Then there are the less publicised and very technical treatment styles such as cranial, ligament balance and visceral treatments. Around these types of treatment are other techniques that combine and utilise either intricate or global muscle, organ or joint movement or focus on treatment and static relaxation of tissue.
Osteopathy can focus on any tissue in the body to provide correction and treatment of an issue that hinders recovery from an illness or relieves pain suffered due to dysfunction of any body part. Wow – in that last long sentence I may have accidentally formulated a simplified answer to the question posed. It does not explain everything laid out in this blog but I feel it does get to the basic point and allows further discussion around the subject if time permits.
Finally then – as an Osteopath, what do I do? All of the above but more focussed on gentle and reciprocal movement by the patients. I feel if we work together during the treatment patients are more likely to understand their bodies and inadvertently work on their posture and body movement more than they would if I treated statically. The bony joint movement of HVT’s are effective and I do use them, however not as a matter of course – every Osteopath is different in their approach to treatment and explaining this is also a challenge. One thing at a time I think, let’s just get the message out there that Osteopathy is so much more than the sum of its name!
Shelley James M.Ost