Non-conventional Medicines

Osteopathy – a global approach to the health

Validity of an art of healing

The osteopaths of the SBO-BVO, bound to the Académie d’Ostéopathie de Belgique, have been working for years to integrate their art in the panoply of health disciplines. They wish to actualise the practice of osteopathy and to get osteopathy out of the ideology of the 19th century, attached to the past, the tradition, and dogmas.

If we go back to the past, to the 18th and 19th centuries, the pre-scientific medicine had always been part of an ideological movement. Neurosciences could therefore only be developed once the theory of inneism was abandoned in Descartes’ ideas.

The challenge of the Académie d’Ostéopathie de Belgique – and hence of osteopathy as a whole –is to observe this process. Osteopathy, founded in the 19th century, is the Creation of a man, Andrew Taylor Still, who developed a medical philosophy in the middle of all the philosophies emerging through these historical times.

Nowadays, at the beginning of the 21st century, osteopathy still exists, its praxis has been justified and forces osteopaths to reconsider the speculations rooted the origin of their art and to propose a new definition of osteopathy.

	"Osteopathy is a diagnostic and manipulative therapy approach to malfunctions in joint and tissue mobility in general, as these contribute to the appearance of illnesses". (Definition of the Académie d'Ostéopathie de Belgique)

If we accept this definition, we can also apply it to Manual Medicine. It is not a corporatist definition.

Nonetheless compared to the other trends of Manual Medicine, osteopathy certainly acknowledges a bigger influence from the a-specific characteristics of its action, by the fact that its practitioners attaches great importance to the value of “touch”, even in its most symbolic connotation. It is an implicit recognition of the psychosomatic approach of osteopathy which is one of its special features.

The academy must moreover incite scientific research in order to establish specific modes of action for definite pathologies. In parallel and from a clinical point of view, practitioners must keep in mind how much importance can be induced by touch in their relationship with the patient. The quality of the relationship is related to the healing process. This aspect stems from a philosophy, a humanist conception of medicine which is also shared by other medical disciplines.