Notes About Health

We have all experienced it: we go to the doctor with back complaints, she diagnoses the problem, gives us some medical advice on what activities to avoid, along with a prescription for painkillers. We take the painkillers, follow the advice, and after some time the problem disappears. Or so we think. Two months later, our back gives way again as we attempt to lift some heavy luggage, and are forced to launch ourselves in the vicious doctor-drugs-advice cycle all over again.

Treating psychical injuries is always an uphill struggle, unless you can find a way to eliminate the problem completely. This is where the role of an osteopath becomes central, since osteopaths don’t just treat the symptoms of a problem (as your local GP would), but will look at the entire body take the extra step of finding not only the cause of the ailment, but the cure as well. There are a range of other factors that differentiate an osteopathic doctor from a medical doctor:

1. Osteopaths are specialists in how the body works. Where medical doctors have a general overview of a large number of diseases, osteopaths are specifically trained in the musculoskeletal system. They therefore have a greater understand of how one system within the body influences the other, giving them a diagnostic as well as therapeutic advantage over GPs.

2. Osteopaths also undergo something referred to as Osteopathic Manipulative Training (OMT). This is a special diagnosis technique using one’s hands. This technique stimulates the blood to flow to the target areas, serving as a much more natural way of diagnosing a disease.

3. An Osteopath is trained to use their hands, rather than medication, to help treat an ailment. Instead of using anti-inflammatory treatments, for instance, as a medical doctor would, osteopaths adopt the more natural approach of manipulating the afflicted muscles with their hands, freeing the blood flow and thus motivating the body to engage in its own healthy process. This prevents the same problem from resurfacing in the future.

4. Where doctors deal with the present symptoms of a given problem, osteopaths will look at the persistent history of an illness. If a patient has injured his knee, for instance, a medical doctor would gather a patient’s medical history through a means of blood tests, psychical examinations, and perhaps certain laboratory procedures. An osteopath would acquire this same history by questioning the patient about whether he previously experienced stiffness in the knee joints, whether the knee is more painful in a specific position, or whether the pain increases in the patient’s most active moments. By getting a patient’s history through this approach, osteopaths work to find the cause of the problem, and attempt to cure it at the source.

The benefits of osteopathy are therefore numerous, but do they override the advantages of visiting your local GP? That is for you to decide. Depending on the nature of your ailment, you might even want to see both. The primary question you have to ask yourself whether your physical problem is a reoccurring one, and whether you want to treat the symptoms, or cure the disease.