I attended the GOsC meeting at the weekend and I was impressed with their new openness and receptiveness to the profession. They happily accept that the documents produced to date are flawed first drafts. This makes it even more important for everyone to respond, as they are open to change. There were about 170 delegates there. I asked for a show of hands for ‘who thinks dividing osteopathy into categories is a good idea?‘ and only one hand was raised.
I have done an analysis on Google News Archive for 1999-2009. This searches for all relevant press articles for a given time period (in English). The results are as follows:
osteopathy = 6860 articles, of which:
osteopathy + back pain = 1400 articles (20%)
osteopathy + children = 1010 articles (15%)
osteopathy + athletes = 533 articles (8%)
osteopathy + cranial osteopathy = 185 articles (3%)
osteopathy + joint manipulation = 19 articles (0.3%)
I think this shows that treatment of children is as ‘core’ as treating back pain in the minds of the public. It also indicates that defining ourselves by the techniques we use is not meaningful. One osteopath at the meeting summed up the definition of osteopathy by saying ‘we treat structure to restore function‘. I’m not sure we need to get any more complicated than that.
Thank you Mary for your real world analysis, it is good to see what is happening out there – it is too easy to get entrenched in our own political corner.
I won’t ask who was the one hand raised for dividing osteopathy …
Thank you Mary
I have come increasingly to the view that it is senseless to try to categorise Osteopathy according to presenting complaint, patient group or treatment method. The whole point of Osteopathy is that we don’t treat the presenting complaint, we treat the patient to allow them to recover normally. Every patient is unique and the factors that are disrupting health will be unique to every patient. There is more than one way of skinning a cat – the technique used will depend upon the presentation, the patient, the osteopath and quite possibly other factors such as the time of day! And, the way I perform any single technique will be different from every other osteopath, to some degree.
All of which means that it is misleading to suggest that there could be a “typical” patient experience. There is no such thing as a typical patient or a typical osteopath. In teh context of Osteopathy, “typical” is meaningless.
SO – the OPF needs to be comlpetely re-thought on a different basis.
Any offers?