Osteopathy

Here we will try to show the basic principles of a great therapeutic methodology as Osteopathy. We will begin by saying that it is not a paramedical profession, or an alternative medicine, or a series of techniques disconnected from an overall idea, that can be applied outside a global osteopathic treatment plan, conceived from a “clinical-functional-osteopathic diagnosis”.

It is therefore a therapeutic discipline and a set of specific knowledge based on the anatomy and physiology of the human body, the knowledge of how the different tissues intervene in the production of a disease and the application of standardisation techniques in altered functions, techniques which Osteopathy has developed over more than a century of evolution in the discipline (the first school of Osteopathy dates back to the year 1892 in the United States) through Osteopathy Schools or Faculties of Osteopathic Medicine, depending on the development of the discipline in each country.

Although Osteopathy is fundamentally related to problems affecting the locomotor system, the fact is that it treats the human being as a whole, restoring the disturbed balance through manual techniques directed to any of the affected tissues, whether these are from the musculoskeletal, visceral, nervous system, etc. It is a manual therapy that helps to relieve, correct and recover musculoskeletal injuries and organic pathologies. Osteopathic intervention performs a functional diagnosis using a set of methods and techniques for therapeutic and/or preventive purpose that are manually applied to muscular, articular, connective, nervous tissues, etc. They obtain, directly or reflex, physiological reactions that balance and normalise the different muscular, osteoarticular, organic and functional alterations, improving or resolving the clinical issue and emphasising specifically its painful manifestations.

The mechanisms of self-regulation in the organism are ensured by the nervous, circulatory and lymphatic systems. The loss or reduction of these intrinsic mechanisms can lead to disease conditions. Osteopathic intervention may mainly affect pre-pathological conditions, in other words, in phases of functional dislocation of initial symptomatic manifestations, but due to a lack of information or health culture, most times osteopathic treatment is used in already developed phases of health alteration. In these cases, Osteopathy also facilitates the inherent mechanisms of self-regulation, allowing the body to recover and achieve normalisation of the altered functions, which translates into reduced symptoms and re-encounter with the original health status.

Osteopathy there works by respecting and facilitating the self-regulation of the organism in any pathology and not so much by making it dependent on purely external or passive solutions, such as the sometimes excessive use of medicines. Osteopathy, in a holistically approached context, through global bio-medical-psycho-social models, promotes or recovers homeostasis or mechanical balance of all musculoskeletal, nervous, visceral, circulatory, and other body tissues, and does so with the application of manual techniques directed to tissues identified as pathological in osteopathic functional diagnosis.

By affecting all the aforementioned tissues, the manual technological development of Osteopathy has led to the classification of techniques in several large groups, according to which tissues it acts on. Therefore, we are talking about: