What is Osteopathy?

Osteopathy in the UK is a well respected and sought-after medical profession within the primary healthcare system. An ever increasing popularity throughout Europe has been evident in recent years.

Osteopathy is an established and recognised system of diagnosis and treatment for a wide range of medical conditions. It lays its main emphasis on the structural integrity of the body in order to assure for best possible function and health.

The osteopath understands that in order for your body to work well, its structure must also work well. So osteopaths work to restore your body to a state of balance, where possible without the use of drugs or surgery and to treat not just the symptoms but the causes of the symptoms.

The treatment consists of the use of manual techniques that will help your body to readjust and increase the mobility of joints, relieve muscle tension, enhance the blood and nerve supply to tissues. All these changes are necessary requirements for your body’s own healing mechanisms. This unique way of assessing and treating the person provides a broad and holistic approach in the recovery to health.

Age is no barrier for osteopathy since each patient is assessed individually and treatment is according the presenting symptoms and needs of the patient.

Osteopathy promotes health and prevents symptoms to reoccur!

Scope of Osteopathy

The aim is to reduce pain, improve health and mobility and to provide advice on health, lifestyle and correct body mechanics for the sport aficionado.

In osteopathy we look for SOLUTIONS for your back, hip, shoulder or any other joint pain.
Osteopathy can provide RELIEVE for arthritic and rheumatic pains, headaches, muscle tensions, sciatica and neuralgias
Osteopathic treatment provides an EFFECTIVE and HOLISTIC treatment for asthma, digestive and circulatory complaints

The Importance of the spine

The spine is important in osteopathic treatment as it is possibly together with the pelvis the weakest structure of the human framework.
It is a vertical osseous structure composed of a series of vertebrae joining together and forming a close association with the skull, ribs and pelvis. There are 102 joints all exposed to the inevitable constant force of gravity. Therefore some of these areas of the spine are definite points of weakness due to their anatomical and mechanical role within such complex structure.

The spine must not only support the body in the erect position, but it also has to cope with all the physical burdens and strains of a lifetime and allow perfect freedom of movement in all directions.

The effects of posture and gravity line are of great importance to the osteopath. A detailed medical history together with a spinal examination and the evaluation of the pelvis and posture gives the osteopath all necessary information to diagnose and understand the problem pattern the patient presents with.

It is not far-fetched to say that 102 joints of such a structure with all the demands we put it through in life will at some stage show signs of dysfunction.

Any injury to the spine not only concerns us for the limitation and reduction of the quality of movements but more so for the close proximity of each 102 spinal joints to important nerve centres. Iinterferences with any part of the vertebral column will predisposes to altered organ function by an abnormal set up of reflex pathways to the corresponding level of the spinal cord.

CLASSICAL OSTEOPATHY

Osteopathy is not manipulation. The Osteopathic Lesion is physiological and not anatomical. The key to this is found in Adjustment, not correction: this is impossible in the living body. Clinically, the action is directed conjointly to all the body tissues, employing the limbs as long levers directed to the spine with mild articulation only. It is not possible to adjust the abnormal to the normal, which means that local treatment remains local without general or permanent effect. This can only be gained by a process of integration which begins at a point furthermost from the point of lesion, thus tracing the injury backward from the final to the original disturbance.

The loss of integrity and loss of balance in the body is due to an imbalance between the central and sympathetic nervous systems and the proper inter-relation between the laws of statics and dynamics in the body. These two mainsprings represent the basis of classical osteopathy.

WHY CLASSICAL OSTEOPATHY?

“Osteopathy carries us back to nature, to the body processes, to the body vitalities and the physiological causes, physiological conditions and physiological functions, and all these, not upon mysticisms; we have based and still base our theory of Osteopathy.” J.M.Littlejohn

If we are prepared to approach our treatment with the concepts of the mechanico-physiological relationship the effects of our treatment will be beyond the limitation of the ordinary physical treatment and encourage us to widen our scope of what Osteopathy can do.

“Osteopathy is a system of medicine, using the word medicine not to indicate drugs but to indicate the science and art of treating diseases or injuries and the laws that regulate their practice.” J.M.Littlejohn

About osteopathy

What is Osteopathy?

Scope of Osteopathy

The Importance of the spine

CLASSICAL OSTEOPATHY

WHY CLASSICAL OSTEOPATHY?

Toscano Osteopathy

Bruxelles

Den Haag