Osteopathy is Philosophy

What distinguishes Osteopathy from everything else?  Ultimately, Osteopathy is a way of thinking.  But what does that even mean?

Everyday examples demonstrate what it means to think osteopathically.  These examples reveal why thinking osteopathically is more familiar than you might realize.

When you’re putting the fitted bedsheet on your mattress and you’ve got 3 of the corners on, you don’t just keep pulling the tight 4th corner trying to get it over the mattress. That’s a recipe for torn fibres at worst, or simply a losing battle at best.  Instead, you step back, assess the whole sheet, and gather some slack from the other corners first. Then you can successfully pull that 4th corner over the mattress.

When your shoelace is knotted, you might push the tangled parts closer together to be able to undo the knot.  Or with a stuck drawer you might search for and remove the scissors obstructing the drawer from sliding open.

This is osteopathic thinking: understanding structure and function, recognizing when something is abnormal, and bringing it back towards normal.  Each according to its unique case.

Think Like an Engineer, Work Like a Mechanic

Whether you’re dealing with a kinked garden hose, a stuck drawer, or tangled necklace, the approach is the same. You need to understand what you’re working with, know how it’s supposed to work, and recognize when something’s not right. Then you can figure out how to restore it back to normal.

Classical Osteopathy: A Mechanic for the Human Body

Classical osteopathy applies this same systematic thinking to human anatomy. The human body, as a living system, is self-healing and self-regulating when it’s functioning properly. But inevitably, like that fitted bedsheet or kinked hose, restrictions develop and prevent normal function.

Classical Osteopathy assesses the body’s motion restrictions – not just where symptoms appear, but the whole lesion pattern of tensions, compressions, torsions. This philosophy understands that a shoulder problem might be like that 4th bedsheet corner: the real reason it got injured isn’t because it was weak per se, and the way to rehab it is to work with the entire body from global to local to focal.

Osteopathy reestablishes proper relationships, allowing the body’s own healing mechanisms to function.   Your body behaves like a twisted string, and the philosopher’s way is in finding the path to unwind it.  Osteopathy is an empirical, dynamic, responsive hands-on thought process based on principles of natural law, it’s not a passive theoretical mental exercise.  Osteopathy is a problem-solving exercise using asymmetry, tissue texture, motion restriction, guiding the philosopher to find it, fix it, and then leave it alone.