Osteopathic Manual Treatment is a hands-on holistic health practice geared towards enabling the body to self-heal. It is relatable to the likes of Massage Therapy, Chiropractic Treatment, or Physiotherapy, but what distinguishes it?
Trying to define Osteopathic Manual Therapy (OMT for short), like saying its name, can be long-winded. Patients often wonder why we are Osteopathic Manual Practitioners and not Osteopaths? The answer dates back to the early 1900’s when traditional osteopathy based on palpation and manual treatment was absorbed into the realm of allopathic medicine. With osteopathy rising in popularity and success in America, its battle to be fully recognized and accepted lead to the addition of course requirements more in line with medical colleges, including pharmacology. As the Diplomat of Osteopathy transitioned to the Doctor of Osteopathy, the term Osteopath became restricted to their use. Despite OMT programs today being deeply rooted in the teachings of Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of Osteopathy and driving force of its success and popularity at the turn of the 20th century, graduates must tread carefully with the osteopathic name.
The history of Osteopathy is equally awe-inspiring as it is tragic, but as a patient your concern lies in what OMT can offer you today. OMT, as it is taught at the Canadian Academy of Osteopathy (CAO), is a principles-based practice that combines years of rigorous training in anatomy, physiology, theory, and manual skills. The operator uses all these skills when assessing and treating a patient. Treatment is gentle and methodical, and is based on what the patient’s body is showing us during assessment. Results can be immediate or may take some time depending on the underlying issues. I have taken patients with acute muscle pain back to almost normal within a single session, have rid a patient of chronic night terrors, eliminated or greatly reduced sciatica symptoms in many patients, opened up blocked sinuses, improved both fast and slow digestion, and more with the list only growing. What I tell my patients from the onset is that if they are not seeing results within the first three to four sessions then my services may not be suited for their needs and I refer them to other professionals either within or outside the osteopathic realm.
One of the defining differences between OMT and most (but not all) other practices is its full-body approach. I regard the CAO school principle, Mr. Robert Johnston, as the greatest teacher I have had the pleasure of studying under in all my years of grade school and my nine years of post-secondary education. He not only instilled the great wisdom of treating the body as a whole, but also warned that patients will often complain that we did not spend enough time working on “that spot”. As a young student I would explain this to my family in a simple way: your friends play a prank on you by hiding a fish in your room, do you spray Fabreze every hour to mask the smell or do you find the fish and remove it. To the trained Osteopathic Manual Practitioner the aforementioned fishy smell is a piece of a larger puzzle: where is the fish hiding, and is why the fish there in the first place.
Over the next two paragraphs I will use a practical example if you wish to have a better understanding of OMT.
A patient is complaining about pain in their right wrist, WebMD tells them that it is likely Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The practitioner will ask for in-depth history such as how long has it been happening, where they feel discomfort specifically, does anything trigger the pain, etc. They will also ask about hobbies and occupations, like what they do for work, are they at a desk, do they play sports, have you fallen and caught yourself with your hands recently. These are all clues the operator will use to help find the fish and why it is there in the first place. Next they begin assessing and ruling out any red flags that would indicate any reason to refer to a physician. In this case the operator finds that the patient works a desk job, and is finding tension through the shoulders, neck and upper back, as well as rotation in their hips.
The operator looks at the patient’s body as a closed system: where one asymmetry occurs, the body will compensate elsewhere. If you close an air vent in your home, naturally that room will become warmer while cool air will push just a little more into your other rooms. If the patient’s hips are rotated to the right, you may often find that their shoulders are rotated to the left to compensate. Working at a desk, the patient would then be turning their right arm more internally to compensate for that rotation when using their mouse, which may press on nerves lying in front of that shoulder that go into the arm. Hips to shoulders, shoulder to arm, arm to wrist, see where this is going? We correct the hips, shoulder, arm and wrist, but then we treat the neck. That’s because the wrist has been under distress, and the pain it has been feeling sends signals to the brain to indicate something is wrong. Before going to the brain however, the nerves travel to their spinal root, which in this case is in the neck, and believe it or not, when an injured or distressed area of the body is sending all that feedback to the spinal root, muscles around those specific vertebrae can become tight in response, creating what is referred to as the “osteopathic lesion”. Often times if you treat the spinal root you can solve the other issue, and vice versa, but we often treat both to be sure.
There are countless other thoughts and questions an operator will come across in their mind during assessment and treatment: acute or chronic; the nerve, artery, vein, lymphatic involved; superficial, intermediate, or deep tissue; compensated or uncompensated patterns; long leverage or short leverage; how much treatment dosage; direct, indirect or balanced approach; the list goes on. These are all tools the trained Osteopathic Manual Practitioner brings to the table for the patient’s needs. If you believe you or someone you know could benefit from OMT, or are simply curious to try it then do not hesitate to contact me for more information at fourpillarsosteo@gmail.com.
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