About Osteopathy

What Osteopaths do

Osteopaths are trained to look at people in their individual life context and support people in the journey to better health.

Osteopaths have extensive clinical training that allows us to diagnose and treat patients safely and appropriately on an individual basis. We are recognised by the NHS as trusted allied healthcare providers who work alongside, and refer to, other healthcare practitioners when necessary. We have extensive training in anatomy, physiology and technique. We are also trained in medical diagnostic procedures and use these in our patient assessments to ensure we diagnose carefully and appropriately and help people towards the help they need.

Our job as Osteopaths is to assist the natural healing ability of the body when it seems compromised.

What Osteopathy is

Osteopathy is a complete system of manual therapy.

It draws on understanding of how the body works in health to inform us about how to intervene and help the body back to health by helping the body function as well as it can. We aim to stimulate healing by improving blood supply, facilitating pain free movement and physiological function with hands. Working with our hands allows us to develop our sense of touch which informs our approach to the patient at a given moment in time.

We believe that health will follow when the structures of the body are functioning well. And that bodies tend to health and healing - we all see this when cuts repair, broken bones heal and we recover from illnesses and infections.

When Osteopathy was developed

Osteopathy was first developed by Dr Andrew Taylor Still in the 1800s in the USA. He was a frontier doctor on the anti-slavery side in the American Civil War. He saved a soldier's leg from amputation because he realised that the blood supply was intact and this gave the best chance of recovery. After losing his wife and children to spinal meningitis he became disillusioned with the medical practices of the day and embarked on a lifelong quest to understand how the human body functions, seeing it as an integrated whole with health an expression of the functioning of this whole.

He went on to cure many diseases such as dysentery and pneumonia, without resorting to medicines. By the time of his death in 1917 there were at least 6 osteopathic schools in the USA. The first British School was founded in London by a pupil of his, Dr John Martin Littlejohn, in 1915.

When Cranial Osteopathy was developed

Cranial Osteopathy was developed by Dr Still’s student, Dr William Garner Sutherland. He came to understand the significance of the mechanical relationships between the cranial bones and the sacrum, the rhythmical movement that they express in health, and the implications of these findings for many aspects of health.

The development of Cranial Osteopathic thinking now being led by Dr James Jealous who has developed the biodynamic curriculum and international teaching programme. The thinking emphasises the integrated functioning of the whole body and the inter-relatedness of all body systems. It references the fluid forces that guide embryonic development and the ongoing role in health and healing throughout life. The influence of the autonomic (unconscious, automatic) nervous system in healing is addressed and Osteopaths work with this to help effect positive change.

How Osteopathy can help with pain

Pain often happens when our bodies have stopped being able to cope with strains they are carrying and some of the tissues have become damaged and inflamed. Recurrent problems such as low back pain or headaches are often signs that the body has got stuck with a problem that it cannot repair on its own. Pain can be mild, moderate, severe, chronic, niggling, acute - or a mixture of all.

Patients can often identify exactly when a problem started. This may be for example after for example a car accident, a fall, or an illness – and afterwards that the patient hasn't felt quite so fit. On the flip side, aches and pains can start for no apparent reason.

It is the Osteopath's job to work out how and why this has happened.