Treatment for the Whole
One of the main principles of Osteopathy is to assess and treat the whole person, not just the area of the body that might be causing them pain.
Holistic treatment involves detective work - perhaps your knee hurts, but is that because your knee isn’t right, or more because your hip is slightly rotating inward? That might be creating loading through an area of the knee which isn’t designed for that job, giving otherwise healthy tissue a reason to be inflamed.
Your neck may be hurting, but it could be because of an injury to your coccyx from 20 years ago that you no longer think could be relevant to your body now. That injury in your tailbone could have caused tension through ligaments and nerve coverings that connect your pelvis all the way up into the base of your skull. That tension might have built up for years through each level of your spine, and is now finally “squishing” or compressing your head onto your neck.
This is why sometimes, you might come in with pain in one area of your body, and then I spend most of the treatment working on a different area of your body, but to your surprise, the pain goes away.
Holistic treatment isn’t just a nice philosophy - it’s based in anatomy, biology, physics, and chemistry. It’s why I take a good case history at the beginning of your appointment, and why sometimes I might ask you questions in the treatment about old injuries that have told their story through certain tension patterns in your body.
Treating the whole as an Osteopath is also about considering what you do and how you use your body every day, at work, home and during exercise. You might be having a bad run at the golf course, and not realise it’s because your tight hip is affecting your golf swing. So sometimes, my idle chit chat is actually about piecing together a puzzle and coming up with a picture that makes sense to inform my treatment.
Osteopathic treatment aims to gradually get to the root cause of your pain and stop it from happening again. This means that sometimes it’s not a “quick-fix”, but 2 or 3 days after your treatment you suddenly start feeling a lot better. It means that you might have to come in for a few treatments over several weeks, but you should never need excessive amounts of treatment just to feel normal. Although some patients benefit from a maintenance treatment every 6 weeks or so, the main aim of all my treatments is to allow your body to heal itself and not need my input anymore.
It’s important to remember that your body is more than just a pile of bones and muscles stitched together. If the front end of a ship plunges into a wave, you can bet the sailors at the back of it can feel the effects, and it’s the same with your body - if one joint is doing something a little funky, the rest of your body feels the consequences. Your body works as a whole unit, and Osteopathy treats you as a whole unit.
