Osteopathy is a manual medicine based on a thorough knowledge of anatomy, palpation and diagnostics. The body´s musculoskeletal system is used to diagnose the patient’s symptoms and manual treatment through all the tissues in the body is applied to reach the cause of the problem rather than the symptom. How this works in a clinical aspect is through the understanding of the osteopathic basic principles where the body is a unit, the bodys self-healing and self-regulating mechanisms and the relationship between structure and function.

History of osteopathy

Osteopathy developed by Andrew Taylor Still in the late 19th century. A.T. Still, an American M.D. working in the civil war was a man of medicine and curiosity. His innovative research on the anatomical relationships between the systems in the body is of fundamental importance to all manual medicine today. A.T. Still found that the loss of joint mobility between bones affected the health. A loss of mobility had a direct effect on the circulation and there by also the quality of the tissues affected. After years of research he started the first osteopathic school in 1892 in Kirksville, Missouri and to this day, his work is still growing across the world.