About Osteopathy

What Osteopaths do

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

We have extensive clinical training in anatomy, physiology and technique 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 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. Health follows from physiological and anatomical balance. The body is always trying to find its way to health.

What Osteopathy is

Osteopathy is a form of natural medicine.

It draws on understanding how the body works in health to inform us about how to intervene. We aim to stimulate healing by supporting relaxation, improving blood supply, facilitating pain free movement and physiological function with our hands. Working with our hands develops our sense of touch which informs what we treat and how we treat.

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.

Cranial Osteopathy (for the whole body, not just heads… a way of working)

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, the sacrum, and the whole system; 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 has most recently been 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 their 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 lasting change.