Osteopathy promotes the body’s natural ability to heal itself by restoring balance and alignment to the body. It is both gentle and effective and has been a part of medicine for over a hundred years.
Yet osteopathic treatment remains a bit of a mystery for many people. Here are nine facts about osteopathy that may surprise you.
- Osteopathy focuses on improving the body’s overall function as well as treating symptoms. It aims to address the root cause of a condition and restore balance to the body over time.
- You can book in for a health check up if you are not sure whether osteopathy is what you need! Our trained professionals can undertake a full spinal check and overall assessment to help identify and understand anything that is a potential issue. This is ideal at any time of life.
- Osteopaths help you to find the ‘diagnosis’ or cause of the discomfort through taking a detailed case history, understanding your past medical history. They use this information to analyse and perform specialised orthopaedic testing techniques during an in-depth examination. This enables osteopaths to ‘tell you what is wrong’ & ‘what structure is causing the problem’. The approach helps you understand how to help yourself and manage your symptoms more efficiently.
- Osteopathy can help patients from the newborn to elderly. All osteopaths work differently, therefore it’s worth asking before booking.
- Osteopaths help people to live life without pain. And not just back pain!
They alleviate pain and improve mobility in all muscles, joints, nerves, ligaments and tendons in the body. Treatment may also help with bloating, difficulty sleeping, and general weakness.
- Osteopathy can help patients who are in ‘acute pain’ (meaning they are stuck in agony) as well as patients who have been in ‘chronic pain’ for many years. It can help people get out of pain fast, but also help people with chronic pain live a life with either increased mobility or reduced pain. However, like everything in life, there are never guarantees that the pain can be completely eradicated. It depends on the individual.
- Osteopaths empower patients to help themselves. They do this by listening before conducting a thorough examination. After this, they explain any results and work together with their patient to create a personal treatment plan.
- Osteopathy can be beneficial for your mental health as it is a holistic therapy that considers the interconnectedness of body, mind, and spirit. It is known that this helps with anxiety and depression, as well as introducing a feeling of calmness.
- Osteopaths use a range of techniques to alleviate pain and improve function including:
- Soft tissue / muscle massage release
- Spinal manipulation
- Joint mobilisation
- Cranial Osteopathy
- Exercise prescription and rehabilitation
- Lifestyle and wellbeing advice to manage and prevent pain.
- Kinesiotaping techniques
If you would like to learn more or are interested in booking an appointment to discover all that osteopathy can do to support and help you, then contact one of the Osteo Allies clinics. You can book an initial consultation with an OsteoAllies osteopath in Fetcham, Hitchin or London here.