What are osteopathic physicians?!

Osteopathic doctors are trained to use their hands to help the body heal itself. We help the body return to its natural state of functioning like a spring, or a pump, of all circulations, including the circulation of vital energy, from head to toe.

Kids and athletes naturally move in a spring-like fluid way, which allows them to use their entire body in concert. Because this full-body behavior, movement is very efficient. These folks have a lot of energy, power and flow in their movements. Martial artists, when moving this way as an extension of the ground and with great focus, are able to break stacks of boards and bricks with a single strike of a hand. According to these masters, power is a more a function of focus and coordinated, fluid movement than it is about actual physical strength.

So while you have may have neck pain, it could be your ankle or even a stuck emotion that’s keeping you from a full-body “flex.” When we don’t breathe, when we don’t “spring,” we get stiff, and our plumbing gets backed up. Enter pain in the spine, joints and muscles, and maybe fatigue, difficulty breathing and ultimately, disease.

Early in my career I loved emergency room medicine. I appreciate modern medicine for its ability to intervene in acute situations. I appreciate modern medicine much less so when it comes to healing chronic imbalances. Chronic illness is not modern medicine’s strong suit!

Osteopathic medicine supports the resolution of chronic issues beautifully. It frees up the structure so it can stay fit and do its job of pumping of all the fluids in the body, so that nutrients move in and waste products move out. Osteopathic medicine also re-sets, or “re-boots” both the nervous system and the electro-magnetics of the body. A functioning nervous system is evidence that the physical and electromagnetic bodies are well integrated, or synchronized, which in turn renders the body well able to spontaneously self-correct.

On to the story!

During my family practice training, I was working in an emergency room with a woman who had a horrendous headache from hitting her head. None of the pain medication was working. I decided to treat her osteopathically, and her head pain fully resolved with a few minutes. She was amazed, and so was everybody else! At that point my boss, the supervising MD physician who had been teasing me for weeks that osteopathy is “woo woo,” admitted proudly that his grandfather had been a D.O.

After a time this M.D. was so amazed with my results in general that he helped me design a study in the hospital so that I could use their very sensitive instruments to research what was happening to the physiology during my treatments. The study design was approved by the IRB (Internal Review Board), and ultimately what we saw was that through very precise measurements of oxygen delivery to the tissues, my treatments were affecting variability in the heart rate, which correlates with the state of the nervous system. We were able to show with precision that osteopathic medicine can dramatically shift the body from fight-or-flight to a state that supports healing.

What I do now is teach people how to achieve “osteopathic” results by moving in ways that boost their breathing, keep their structure “springy,” and keep their electromagnetics, or vital energy circulating. If we sit, walk, think and breathe in ways that support the “pump nature” of the body, our ability to self-correct is so extraordinary we may rarely need doctors at all.

The practices for “being your own doctor” are simple, easy, enjoyable and fun. We can do them while we’re driving, walking, sitting at our desks . . . all the time. And the best part is, they add no time-requirement to the day! 

In no time, your body can have less pain and less deterioration, you can think more clearly, feel more of your emotions, and have more creative energy and more energy in general.