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About Osteopathy
About Osteopathy
Osteopathy is a hands-on, drug-free system of healthcare with the core concept that your body’s function and its structures are two sides of the same coin. By working with the structures themselves - for example the bones, joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves - and the relationships between them, osteopaths seek to identify, treat, remove and prevent barriers to your natural healing processes and allow you to rediscover natural, healthy function.
Osteopaths are recognised as able to aid with a wide range of conditions, including but not limited to: joint and arthritic pains; backache and back pain in general; pains in the neck, shoulder, elbow, hip, knee and other joints; circulatory and digestive problems; and several types of headache including tension headaches and migraines.
Osteopaths are also fully trained in clinical diagnostic procedures to ensure that osteopathy is an appropriate treatment for each individual’s complaint, and are able to make referrals to other medical practitioners should that be the best course of action for the patient.
How does osteopathy work?
How does osteopathy work?
As osteopaths, we believe that in their natural and healthy states, our bodies have an astounding capacity to adapt, maintain and repair themselves. So, when you present to a clinic with an injury, or movement limitation, or other nagging problem, our job as osteopathic practitioners is to work out what's stopping your body doing what it naturally does so well - getting better.
Where do we look to find the answer to that question? In short, we look at the structures of the body and their relationships to one another. By understanding how those relationships might have changed in response to the circumstances in your life, and how each response has itself then limited the next available range of response, we can try to understand how you have come to encounter either a recent or ongoing challenge that your body isn't able to respond well to.
Once we can understand that, we can use a wide range of different manual techniques to help improve the relationships between the affected structures, restore your ability to adapt successfully, and so get you back to getting yourself better.
Why choose osteopathy?
Why choose osteopathy?
* Optimistic
* Optimistic
Osteopathy is OPTIMISTIC: We believe that, when everything is working as well as it can, we get ourselves better faster and stay well more effectively. (By "everything", we mean all the incredible interrelated systems that have evolved to help us maintain our health: our circulation and drainage systems; our immunological and self-repair functions; the nervous and endocrine systems that communicate between them all -- everything!) The optimism of osteopathy leads us to believe that, if we can just get all these things back into their optimal, healthy relationships -- our patients should recover faster, get better and stay better.
* Scientifically grounded
* Scientifically grounded
Osteopathy is SCIENTIFICALLY GROUNDED: Osteopathy has, at its heart, the detailed study of anatomy, neurology and physiology. We're interested in the structures of your body and how they function in relationship to one another, and we study it at length (for most osteopaths in the UK, that means a minimum of four years' degree-level study). Then we put that knowledge into practice very day in our clinics to make sense of what our patients present with. It's perhaps one of the things that most surprises patients new to osteopathy - just how structural, mechanical and scientific our discipline is.
* Tangible
* Tangible
Osteopathy is TANGIBLE: Because we're working with the physical structures of yor body, guided by your symptoms and by what both you and your osteopath see and feel during examination, you should be able to really feel and measure the difference that osteopathy makes. If osteopathy is indeed making a difference, then your symptoms should change: measurably, tangibly and fairly quickly. And, if your osteopath has correctly understood the issue and applied the appropriate treatment, then you should improve from session to session. What you shouldn't expect with osteopathic treatment is something I hear from patients who've been to some practitioners of other disciplines: "It will take [some large number] of treatments before you can expect an improvement" (all too often, it seems, accompanied by "...which you're welcome to pay for in advance, for a small discount").
* Empowering
* Empowering
Osteopathy is EMPOWERING: This may seem a small thing, but it's absolutely central why I chose to become an osteopath: for us, the person who gets you better is YOU. All we are doing as practitioners is trying to understand what is getting in the way of that normal, natural process, help you change it, and let you get on with getting better. (As one of my tutors once memorably put it: "Everything our patients bodies are doing is a response to their environment. We're just another environmental influence." -- but one that aims to move you back in the direction of health rather than further away from it!) This means that our ultimate aim, as osteopaths, is that you no longer need us! Our goal is to give you back your independence, by helping to restore your natural adaptability with treatment, and by giving you good advice to help sustain those changes. Supporting our patients to become more and more independent of, rather than dependent on, our help is, for me, a defining feature of osteopathic philosophy.
* Organic
* Organic
Osteopathy is ORGANIC: Osteopathy doesn't use drugs, tools or other artificial interventions to achieve its results. Instead we aim to activate and enhance your own natural healing and restorative processes. As the founder of osteopathy, Andrew Taylor Still, observed in the 1870s, "the body has its own medicine chest"; this is a principle more recently reframed by modern-day osteopaths (sadly somewhat less poetically) as : "the body possesses self-regulatory mechanisms, having the inherent capacity to defend, repair, and remodel itself". Where we can, we seek to understand how those mechanisms work, how the structures of the body interact with them, and how the movement of the body's structures can improve or interfere with the functions of those mechanisms -- from relatively simple ideas like needing effective drainage and circulation to alleviate inflammation after an ankle sprain, to the much more complex such as understanding what structures need to be working harmoniously for your body to successfully manufacture and deliver its own endogenous anti-inflammatory compounds to a strained rotator cuff tendon (yes, you really do that!). For those who are interested in a drug-free, non-invasive therapy that aims to reactivate the body's own healing processes without artificial interventions, osteopathy might be just the thing you're looking for.
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