Osteopathy

Introduction
An alternative medical treatment

Osteopathy is a technique that uses manipulation and massage to help distressed muscles and joints and make them work smoothly.
The profession began in 1892 when Dr Andrew Taylor Still (1828- 1917), an American farmer, inventor and doctor, opened the USA’s first school of osteopathic medicine. He sought alternatives to the medical treatments of his day which he believed were ineffective as well as often harmful.

Still’s new philosophy of medicine, based upon the teachings of Hippocrates, advocated that “Finding health should be the purpose of a doctor. Anyone can find disease’. Like Hippocrates, Still recognized that the human body is a unit in which structure, function, mind and spirit all work together. The therapy aims to pinpoint and treat any problems that are of a mechanical nature. The body’s frame consists of the skeleton, muscles, joints and ligaments and all movements or activities such as running, swimming, eating, speaking and walking depend upon it.

A Holistic treatment

Still came to believe that it would be safer to encourage the body to heal itself, rather than use the drugs that were then available and that were not always safe. He regarded the body from and engineers point of view and the combination of this and his medical experience of anatomy, led him to believe that ailments and disorders could occur when the bones or joints no longer functioned in harmony. He believed that manipulation was the cure for the problem. Although his ideas provoked a great deal of opposition from the American medical profession at first, they slowly came to be accepted.
The bulk of scientific research has been done in America with a number of medical schools of osteopathy being established. Dr Martin Littlejohn, who was a pupil of Dr Still, brought the practice of osteopathy to the UK around 1900, with the first school being founded in 1917 in London. He emphasized the compassionate care and treatment of the person as a whole, not as a collection of symptoms or unrelated part. The philosophy and practices of A.T. Still, considered radical in the 1800s, are generally accepted principles of good medicine today.