Medicine could not save 3 of his 5 children from spinal meningitis. He experienced a professional crisis. A man of faith, he reasoned that the human body was designed with self healing capacity. The physician does not cure or heal disease, but assists the patient to regain that diminished capacity.

In our profession, of the approxiamately 65,000 DOs, only 3-5% of us practice osteopathy as it was originally intended by Dr. Still. DO's are physicians and surgeons licensed by the state to practice in any field of medicine. Although DO schools require 500 extra hours of anatomy and 2yrs of musculoskeletal labs with inculcation of 'techniques,' when I treat a patient, actual use of 'technique' is only about 5%. The rest is pure, powerful osteopathy, finding the strains, figuring the patient's problems out, and undoing the strains. It is detective work that takes time. Anything worth doing, is worth the time in order to do it right. No patient will ever permanently respond to cookbook recipes of 'technique.' This is what makes Osteopathy more powerful than any other treatment modality like physical therapy, craniosacral therapy, massage, acupuncture, Reiki, prolotherapy, and chiropractic. This is why we get lasting results and patients feel "amazing" differences after our subtle, high precision treatments. Osteopathy is pure anatomy, physiology, embryology, and diagnosing and treating through palpation. All this knowledge can only be acquired through a medical school background. It is not easy, quick work, but it is beautiful and profound work.

Disease is the end point of a process. MDs and allopathic medicine treat disease once it is found. Treatment is biochemical and expedient. Scientific studies to evaluate drug efficacy and treatment outcomes, if "statistically significant", meet with FDA approval and become "accepted." Patients who do not respond like everyone else, I call these people "statistical outliers" are ignored. Gross diagnostic procedures to find disease, if negative, means that the patient must be faking or crazy.

Traditional osteopaths believe that physical strains lead to disease. This process can be reversed. We diagnose these strains and treat them with our hands. Physical strains, traumatically induced, are embedded in the anatomy and are layered one on top of another. The symptoms that each patient experiences are real to them and can be explained by the mechanical strains. Acupuncture serves to divert chi and its effects are temporary. I remove the strains permanently and chi is secondarily released. My Chinese patients think that I am practicing chi gong and manipulating their chi. These results give lasting relief and are permanent. [Aside: In the first 5 years of treating adults, while I was trying to figure out how to explain osteopathy to people, I hated using the 'E' word; now I at least acknowledge it somewhat].

In the teaching of medicine, we are taught to reduce the human body into organ systems, the systems to tissues, the tissues to cells and the biochemical processes therein. We are taught to look at the trees. But when someone clearly has disease that is mechanically induced, patients are shunted off to physical therapy or to surgeons to grossly 'fix' the mechanical constraints. For example -

whiplash - traumatically induced spasms in the back and neck from a high velocity impact cannot be undone by range of motion exercises, by someone yanking on these irritated muscles. When you get a cramp in your leg, what do you do? If you lay still and wait for it to pass, it will eventually calm down. What would happen if someone yanked on it? You would hurt terribly; so why would you let someone yank on your neck, much less "massage" it? I figure out where physical the strains are locked and undo them gently.

carpal tunnel syndrome - standard treatment is opening up the tunnel surgically. Stepping back to look at the big picture (the forest, not the trees), the tunnel is made of living connective tissue that has elasticity, plasticity and pliability. With knowledge of the anatomy of the wrist, I can open up the tunnel a few millimeters just enough to decompress the nerve; within a few days, wrist swelling diminishes, tenderness is reduced and hair return to the skin surface. Imagine that.

I love explaining Osteopathy and the mechanical causes of disease to my patients who are physical scientists - physicists, engineers, computer people, JPL, and NASA people; I can see that they "get it," and we 'click.' I have never, ever, had a physical scientist stop me and tell me that my logic and explanation of their physical strains is flawed. There is more to human disease than just biochemistry.

Unfortunately, I am going to have to admit that there is more to the physical human body. I absolutely hate to acknowledge that there is more...