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Osteopathy is a system of diagnosis and treatment for a wide range of conditions. Osteopathy in the United Kingdom is recognised as Allied Healthcare Profession (AHP) and the academic path of practitioners is strictly regulated by training criteria of the General Osteopathic Council (GOsC).
Osteopathy considers the person as a single functional unit, in which the various parts that compose it (muscles, bones, viscera, circulatory system, nervous system, etc.) are in a continuous dynamic relationship and work together to maintain the harmony and the well-being of the individual.
Once the balance has been restored, the body begins to heal itself. In this way, Osteopaths facilitate the natural healing process of the body. This is achieved by a combination of techniques such as neuromuscular, fascial, craniosacral, visceral, indirect techniques and direct Osteopathic manipulation.
Story of Osteopathy
The term “Osteopathy” was coined by its founder, the American surgeon Dr Andrew Taylor Still, who at the end of the nineteenth century discovered the relationships between the functional balance of the whole body structure and health. Dr Still, disappointed with traditional medicine who had failed to save his three children affected by meningitis, after observing Indian healers and dissecting numerous bodies, developed a new conception of the human body and another way to cure it.
The innovation consists of some key principles of which osteopathy is still used:
• A person is a unit.
• The body can self-regulate and self-heal.
• The body’s structure and function are dependent on each other at all levels.
• Rational treatment is based on these principles.
Osteopathy is based on the application of all these three principles.
Still lived in Kansas, near Baldwin City, during the American Civil War, and here he developed the practice of osteopathy. Still learned as an apprentice, as was the case with many of the doctors of the time, and was hired as a war physician in the United States Army during the civil war. The horrors of the wounds on the battlefields and the subsequent death of his wife and several children due to infectious diseases left him completely disappointed with the traditional practice of medicine. Concerned by what he considered to be the problem within the medical profession, Still founded the osteopathic practice. Using an alternative philosophical approach, he opposed the use of drugs and surgery as remedies, reserving their use for cases where they were the only known cure for a certain disorder, as an antidote for poison or amputation for gangrene. He considered the human body capable of healing itself, and that the physician’s task was to remove all impediments to the normal functions of each individual. It promoted a lifestyle and a healthy diet, abstinence from alcohol and drugs, and used manipulative techniques to improve physiological functions.
Still gave his new medical school the name “osteopathy”, thinking that “the structure” (osteon) was the starting point from which the cause of the conditions of pathology should be ascertained. The purpose of osteopathy was to “make improvements to current systems of surgery, obstetrics, and the treatment of general diseases”. Its scientific foundation was the discipline of anatomy.
His philosophy was based on understanding the integration of body, mind and spirit, the interrelationship between structure and function, and the body’s ability to heal itself when mechanically healthy. Osteopathic treatment must be a rational application of these principles in a comprehensive treatment of the patient with special attention to the neuro-musculoskeletal system as an integral part of the health and disease processes. Over time, Still, his students and his faculty developed a comprehensive medical-school program that included a series of special physical treatments, now called Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment (OMT). On 10 May 1892, Still founded the American School of Osteopathy (now Andrew Taylor Still University, College of Osteopathic Medicine of Kirksville) in Kirksville, Missouri, for teaching osteopathic medicine.
In the late nineteenth century Still taught that the disease (coming from “dis” – “ease”) arose when the bones were out of place and interrupted the flow of blood and nerve impulses; he, therefore, concluded that diseases could be treated by manipulating the bones to restore the interrupted flow.
Research began in Kirksville in the last decade of the nineteenth century and has since been continued there and in other osteopathic institutions. The A.T. Still Research Institute was founded in 1913 and Louisa Burns, osteopathic doctor, and others developed a rigorous series of scientific investigations on the relationship between musculoskeletal dysfunctions and health and disease. The criticism of Still shows that he never personally conducted any controlled experiment to prove his hypotheses; his supporters showed that many of Still’s writings were philosophical rather than scientific. Still questioned the uses of drugs in his time and looked at surgery as a “last resort” remedy.
The osteopathic profession has evolved independently outside the United States, where it remained essentially a drug-free system based solely on manipulative techniques.