Advice please

Have you checked out the training requirements through the General Osteopathic Council's website? - it is quite rigorous. Also, when you say 'shadowing' do you mean just watching? You would need to contact local osteopaths to discuss this - I know that the chap I worked with did not allow anyone in the treatments rooms except his patients and their relatives.

I shared a clinic with an osteopath for a few years. He was constantly busy, and worked every third weekend (Sat and Sun) to cater for people who couldn't afford to take time off work. He made a very good living at it. He came into osteopathy after a career in the Army, so he was a late starter, but loved what he did. He paid an absolute fortune (well, 25 years ago £10,000 was a fortune!) to train in London over 4 years. He retired a couple of years ago.

I see my own osteopath probably twice a year, or if I have any twinges - she soon puts me right. She is not a quack, and I would recommend you ignore the remarks on the website you mention.

Thanks for the reply,

Yeah, im pretty confident with my qualifications. My A-levels were all the sciences and my degree was also science based.

LIke i said in my first post, i like the idea of the holistic approach, but im worried that after 4years and £6-10,000 later i might get bored with the repition.
Can anyone comment on the variation of the job or is it quite similar from one patient to the next?

Hi Soulman,

The variation depends on you and where you choose to focus. It will get boring if you allow it, just like any other job.

I chose my specialist area whilst learning my Aromatherapy Diploma back in 1997. Since choosing the direction I wanted to go, I've found each and every day and client different and some very challenging.

I merged what I'm good at - deep tissue work - and what I'm enjoy - a challenge.

The following areas I don't work within;

Pregnancy - only existing clients
Children & babies
Palliative
Elderly

I find these difficult because I have a strong touch, and I don't have a connection with them.

My client base consists of relative healthy high flyers and specific issues. This niche market keeps me very busy and challenged. I'm always looking for better ways to work and problem solve.

Since qualifying as an Aromatherapist I've gone and studied different deep tissue techniques including a visit to China (Tui Na), I'm also a Counsellor and Reiki Healer. I love what I do and so do my clients.

If you don't have a passion for this work then, maybe you need to think about another career.

Cheers, Sue

Hi Soulman

please don't pay any attention to skeptics, as osteopaths are some of the most revered therapists in the country, all the ones I know do not/would not call themselves Dr but many chiros do (to some consternation ).

If osteopathy represents your first interest in a hands on approach to wellness then it may prove more benificial to take a somewhat easier course first eg massage therapy.

Being/staying effective as a therapist, is as much, if not more, about your ability to relate/empathise with your client as it is to have certs on the wall.
If you love meeting people and being able to effect pain relief then I doubt very much if you would get bored doing that ! its actually a very special privilage.

I am not an osteopath, but if you become a good one, then I can't see employment being a problem.

Wishing you well steve

Thanks for your replies guys.

My degree was science based so I am confident of my ability to work through the course. I was more concerned with not enjoyong it after spending 4years learning. I guess though, like you say, if you are able to relieve people of pain, then then the job satisfaction should be excellent, something which my current job lacks tremedously.

I did apply to study a masters in occupational therapy, but didnt get on the course. I think it was beacuse i didnt manage to secure any work experience before the interview, so it was after exploring my options that i came across osteopathy. I liked what i read and especially liked the eventuality of running my own practice. Be your own boss....stick it to the man 🙂

If there are any osteopaths out there, i am still interested to hear about a typical day fro you guys.

Cheers

Maybe this is a good sign soulman! they are all so busy, no time for healthypages methinks, hopefully anahata will be along shortly but dont hold your breath.

Pay no attention to the skeptics forums, they're designed to wind you up, nothing more. They consist of a hard core who stick together like glue, and pronounce themselves the high priests of good sense. Everybody else must be completely innocuous, or gets dumped pretty quickly.

It's actually impossible to have a sensible discussion with them, because they have a completely malleable set of standards, and set the bar at different levels depending on whether you a) are a devout worshipper of the almighty god of evidence-based pharamcology, or b) anything else.

When using their illogical arguments and double-standards doesn't let their totally toxic message come out on top, they use bully-tactics, swearing, belittlement, intimidation, a lot of teddy-throwing, and a kafka-esque system of moderation. If that doesn't work, they arbitrarily ban members and suspend accounts for posting evidence that meets the standards they demand. They also delete posts and whole threads selectively without trace, meaning that what arises is a large knowledge-base, visible to google, supporting the views they espouse. The more anyone engages with them, the more this 'resource' is reinforced.

In short, they are an utter disgrace to the cause of rational enquiry.

The history of these set-ups begins with Quack-Busters, the original and worst. During the 1970's, the American Medical Association were engaged in a systematic campaign to discredit chiropractic - their biggest rival. A court actually compelled them to desist, at which stage their entire campaign inventory of files and papers ended up with one Stephen Barrett, and he began Quack Watch aka Quack Busters. Ironically, he claims medical credentials that he does not possess, making him the biggest quack of the lot. Last I heard he was on the run from legal debts totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars for cases he lost against practitioners whom he challenged.

So, funny bunch, but not a good source of information. Why anyone wants to waste time engaging with them is utterly beyond me.

kvdp

thanks for being the only one to seemingly discredit/stand up against what the skeptics say.

The thing is, i still want to be able to see/read about tried and tested methods.
I think that this stems form the fact that my background is largely scientific. I have a degree in forensic science and I chose a science based field as i like to be able to see how/why things work. When I encountered osteopathy, I looked into it and tried to discover how it worked i.e what the scientific mechanisms behind it were, but was only met with quite vague descriptions.

Most of the descriptions online say something along the lines of...the body has a natural propensity to heal itself and osetopathy uses various techniques and manipulations to assist in the process. On top of that, i have come across a whole lot of people (mainly those in the medical profession) who claim that with no rigid scientific backing the profession is quackery and belongs in the psedoscience bracket.

To take some text from an article on one website i came across, it was reading things like this that was making me hesitant in my applications....

Within the first few weeks of the commencement of my training, I became more and more concerned with the lack of consideration for basic scientific principles. I was rather shocked when in OMM lab I found myself holding my hands inches above another students abdomen attempting to feel her "energy pulsations." I was amazed at the lengths the Osteopathic faculty would go to explain why data for the efficacy of OMM was so dismal. There were some truly paranoid responses to politely worded inquiries concerning lack of evidence in the literature for osteopathy’s benefits

Also, reading things like "the cerebo-spinal fluid conatains another fluid called the "breath of life"" was not really condusive to helping my predicament. Despite the fact that the training is similar to that of a medical doctor, there are certain elements that seem to be shrouded in mysticsm and I can see why the "other side of the fence" call it quackary.

Having said that, i am well aware that science, as much as it has aided our evolution over the centuries, cannot explain everything, and it is foolish to dimsiss something because its workings cannot be explained by sciencies dogmatic priciples. If we dont approach the unknown with an open mind, there is a danger of actually retarding growth. There is so much we dont understand....the nature of reality and consciousness, but just because they cannot be explained by scientific models, doesnt make them any less real.

There is an equally large part of me that can taste the ineffable. I know we are part of something bigger humanity/gaia...call it what you will, but i certainly dont think our experience here is restricted to the human experience....we are just the cells of a much larger organism.

Its thoughts like these that mean i have not dismissed these elements of mystiscm which seem to be engrained into osteopathy, but rather im willing to investigate them further.

For me, i have been torn bewteen the two sides of the coin.....its a battle between left and right brain ideologies. Logic versus intution and creativity.
Did anyone else hit this hurdle in their journey?

I have been offered interviews at all of the places i have applied to, so hopefully going to see "what its all about" should help me out. In fact, I have one at the BSO on Friday. Anyone been through the same thing? Any advice?

Hi Soulman,

I don’t like giving anything other than full answers to questions and the questions you ask would require very long and detailed answers to offer any real value, but as you mailed me directly to ask my opinion, as a 4th year Part-time Osteopathy student, here’s a short answer:

Doing the course is the best decision I’ve ever made. The quackery argument is a red herring. Landing a job when you finish could be difficult but can be achieved with planning and dedication. If I could only offer you one piece of advice, assuming you are a mature career change student, it would be: Make sure the decision is lead by your heart and not your head and be prepared to dedicate yourself to that path above everything else in your life for at least 10 years. ( 5 years for the course and 5 years for the career change) anything less will probably end in disappointment.

I know this sounds heavy, it’s meant to!! If you are ever in Nottingham I would be very happy to have a coffee with you.

Cheers

Adam

Hi Soulman
these are great questions to be asking, I hope I can help. The first day of my studies I knew I was doing the right thing. It was very tough, and extremely intense, but Osteopathy turned out to be just the most exciting thing I've ever done, and even now it still just keeps getting better.

Osteopathy has been described as an 'art science', in that it combines the strength of rational knowledge with the potency of experience and intuition. These last two are things that the evidence-based element in healthcare are trying to eliminate, yet ironically they have no evidence to show that this actually leads to better care.

Similarly, in every field there is a flakier tendency, and this isn't entirely healthy either. But it's a mistake to think that any other area of science is immune to this - medicine is rife with assumptions, guesswork, and superstition.

Supposedly 'rigorous' medicine is unrigorous in its foundations. For example, the World Health Organisation's definition of health is flakiness of the highest order. It defines health in completely self-referential terms, and by what it isn't (not just the absence of disease, which they fail to define as anything at all), and in terms of well-being, which of course is hard to understand without reference to health. It fails to say anything about either health or disease, and this is the basis for the entire medical mission statement. And the flaws carry on from there, from Occam's Razor right on through - and this is a system that according to the skeptics is based on facts only and has no philosophical stance.

In osteopathic terms, health is about the coordination and coherence of function of a system that is efficient fro a thermodynamic point of view (the body as a unit). Although this can't easily be measured, it includes effective allocation of resources (the rule of the artery reigns supreme), the tendency through homoeostasis to remain within safe limits, and return to safe limits when disturbed (the body has its own medicine chest), and all within natural laws (structure and function must be related).

I think that in describing health alone osteopathy is light-years ahead of medicine. And osteopathy is about seeking health. Yet in college, we had not one single lecture on the subject - thanks largely to the medicalisation of our training during the 1950s. This is fair, because medicine does not study health either. Hence the NHS is largely known as the National Sickness Service. And it is no joke - there is very little that it has contributed to the health of the nation. Now don't get me wrong, I am not anti medicine - if I was flattened by a bus I'd be happy to receive the works at my local hospital, because that's what they are good at. But for chronic and degenerative disease there is plenty of evidence that they are worse than useless - one interesting statistic is that when doctors go on strike death rates fall!

My background is also science. I came from a family of engineers and did physics at university. But when a close relative was in hospital after a stroke, it came clear that for all their knowledge and fine measurement, the 'best' rehab unit in Britain were unable to do a single useful thing. What made this painful was that we could see so much that could be done, but strict methodolgy prohibited this. As my sister said after one extraordinarily frustrating meeting with consultants 'if they were building a bridge it would simply collapse'.

Osteopathy is not short of strange ideas either, but there is a history to this. The early osteopaths studied the rationale of their field with incredible rigour. They were trying to reform a medical system that knew everything but failed to achieve anything. The physiological basis of our ealry work was very painstakingly explored over about a century until the 1970's. For example, they found the pathways linking spinal reflexes to organ function, both in dissection, and in lab experiments on animals and humans, and confirmed them in the clinic. Even now, medical researchers still 'discover' some of these pathways, as if they were completely new. Statistics from the early osteopathic hospitals are still available, and they achieved great success. Crucially, they realised that these are not one-to-one relationships, but that there is a whole context of natural health philosophy without which the charts and descriptions are meaningless.

But amost immediately after the death of AT Still (the first osteopath) efforts were made to bring osteopathy in line with medicine and make it acceptable, and much was lost in the process. Politics and commercial interests had a lot to do with this. There have always been practitioners who have tried to keep it pure and bring back the elements of osteopathy that defined it, but it is difficult.

Whils the osteopathic colleges teach a lot of medical science, much of the specific, rigourous osteopathic science has been forgotten, along with the philsoophical framework - the north pointers on the maps - that makes it meaningful. This gap has been filled by all sorts of beliefs and practices - some of it good, some of it dubious - by practitioners who know there's something missing and are keen to keep something alive. Crucially, though, it's not always easy to tell which is right and which is wrong - I still look back and sometimes can't tell which of my teachers were right.

The self-healing ability of the human body is actually a good idea, there's nothing controversial about is. Moreover, this is a tenet of most medical practitioners too, that you can't heal anything, you can only help the body to heal itself. The medical method is in poison, and some of us think that this is a very poor strategy. It's very doubtful that the body has any chance of recovery to stability when being micromanaged to the nth degree: but that's another story.

And every so often somebody produces a paper that shows that osteopathy doesn't work for back pain or something daft. These can only possibly be produce by people who've never had the experience of being treated by a truly visionary practitioner - like the weather man who's so busy looking at his computer that he never looks out of the window. Ask any of my patients in the last week what they think of this kind of result and they'd be amazed, they'd say this kind of study must be completely flawed. If a study proves that bumblebees can't fly, then, you don't tell all bumblebees to land at once, you look to your methods to find out what has gone wrong with the study.

So science is a huge part of osteopathy, but thank god we are still at liberty to use our brains and encouraged not to take any fact at face value. Evidence-based medicine deals in results over huge samples - eg 5000 stroke patients in a region - whereas we have to deal in samples of one, so the unique characteristics of every case are what concern us, and you can't always for test that in RCT's.

In a hospital, you don't have to have all the answers, but if you ask all the right questions, and tick all the right boxes, you'll never be at fault - even if your therapeutic is completely ineffectual, or even dangerous. This is becomming the essence of EBM.

What the 'skeptics' don't realise is that science creates responsibility for others to have to handle. Society picks up the bill when science gets it wrong; but when science gets it right, it is a triumph of reason. This double standard is everywhere. But humanity has to deal with questions science can walk away from any time it likes. This applies in healthcare as much as anywhere else.

So whilst we are indeed very much informed by science, osteopaths have both the liberty and the duty to use their judgement and their senses, not as a last resort, but as primary clinical tools. Any field that tries to deny this faculty is missing the point. Luckily most doctors value the importance of wisdom and experience atleast as highly as a checklist, but many of the most vehement proponents of Evidence-Based medicine in its purest form are not actually clinicians, but professional researchers, administrators, and politicians.

Helping people requires courage. Our training ensure that this does not become recklessness. You will be faced with situations where there is no name for what you are seeing, no textbook, no trial, no prior knowledge of any kind. You will apply your thinking tools, and trust the cpacity of the patient to recover, and you will get results where the best consultants with million-dollar toys have failed. And that is an incredibly satisfying thing to do.

But I agree, in my view there is no actual need for metaphysics and mysticism in osteopathy, we are dealing in physiology, albeit some strange corners of that field. We can't explain everything that is true, but it ought to at least be compatible with the laws of the universe somehow. There is plenty of scope for rigour in this field if that is what you want, believe me.

Be aware also that different osteopathic colleges do have their own unique flavours, I think you'll find that the atmosphere at the BSO is different from what you've experienced so far. But at the end of it all, you are going to take your learning, appraise the strengths and weaknesses of it all very critically, form your own conclusions and make it your own. And that is no bad thing.

Now I know you're desperate for some meatier resources. You could try and find Frank Willard's work on Reflex sympathetic dystrophy, Irwin Korr's various volumes of papers, Louisa Burns' work on spinal lesionology, Fryette's mechanical studies, Laurie Hartman's technique guides. That's enough.

is a forum for osteopaths and students, with a lot of useful links.

Now this is far longer than I intended, apologes for that, but it's been an interesting exercise, thanks. Gotta go now.

Recently met an osteopath who had recently completed her training at Epsom.

Apparently there are now funds/sponsorship/bursorys available that can help with the burden of completing these courses.

Recently met an osteopath who had recently completed her training at Epsom.

Apparently there are now funds/sponsorship/bursorys available that can help with the burden of completing these courses.

Stephen, there is no information about funding on that provided link. If you do have any information on this though, that would be most appreciated, as at the minute funding a full time 4year course, on top of living costs in London, isnt looking too inviting!!!!

@ KVDP

Again, thank you for your indepth and expansive reply.
Im not sure if you have helped to answer my question, but in al honesty, I think that is bercause i dont really know what my question is. I really appreciate your input though.

My interview at the BSO went pretty goo i think. I dunno how long it will be before i heard back. I have another interview at BCOM on Friday and one at ESO towards the end of the month. Hopefully visiting the places and speaking with lecturer and students will provide a clearer picture.

To be honest, i think i have already made up my mind and am going to go ahead and study it (dependant on course offers obviously)...i guess im just trying to clear away some of the fuzzy edges and uncertainties in my head.

Does anyone have any comments on schools and their different approaches?

Im not sure if you have helped to answer my question, but in al honesty, I think that is bercause i dont really know what my question is. I really appreciate your input though.

To be honest, i think i have already made up my mind and am going to go ahead and study it (dependant on course offers obviously)...i guess im just trying to clear away some of the fuzzy edges and uncertainties in my head.

Not a problem! Some questions can't be answered, you just have to make a decision and see what happens. Logic alone won't help you make up your mind.

In our first year, we lost about a quarter or a third of our year. If you discover it's not what you want you'll still meet wonderful people and learn a lot about yourself.

Eliminating fuzziness is impossible to do, at least entirely. Embracing fuzziness is probably more pragmatic.

Loosely speaking, the BSO is renowned for educational rigour and clinical excellence. The others are supposed to lean more towards conceptual matters, but I suspect this difference is supposed and not real, I don't see it reflected in the various practitioners I know.

What gets your patients better will ultimately be down to your vision, not the name of the school you attend.

If you haven't yet experienced treatment I'd say this is a very important starting point, it's important to have walked the walk.

Whatever you decide, have a great time.