Petts Wood Osteopathic Clinic 
What is Osteopathy?
Osteopathy is an holistic therapy based on a developed sense of touch in both Diagnosis and Treatment primarily of musculo-skeletal problems (especially back pain). It starts from an understanding of Human Anatomy, Physiology, as well as Pathological processes. Osteopaths work with your body’s self-healing and regulating mechanisms to restore your health and well-being. As well as a scientific understanding osteopaths often use their intuition and experience of a deep sense of touch to help both diagnose and treat.
In order to diagnose and treat, Osteopaths follow a few Principles:
1. Your body is a unity where each part works with the other in harmony, each body part influencing the others. Any dysfunction of one part will affect the others and will disturb your body’s harmony, creating pain as well as affecting your health. That's why osteopathy is considered an holistic therapy!
2. In your body, the structure (muscles, skeleton, fascia, blood vessels and heart, lymphatics, lungs, stomach) and function (motion, cardiac pump, drainage, respiration, digestion) are deeply related. Any change in structure will be reflected in a change of function and vice versa. Thus the cause of your back pain could be from a problem concerning your internal organs.
Therefore the symptoms reported by you as well as the examination findings by the Osteopath will be important for the diagnosis of the cause of your pain and the source of dysfunction in your body.
At Petts Wood Osteopathic Clinic, osteopathy focuses on treating the whole person not just the condition. Osteopathy recognises that often the cause of a problem may not just be physical, emotions (see Fascial Unwinding) and other causes can be at the heart of a problem too. Whilst respecting the patients needs osteopathy deals with underlying issues that are often neglected by orthodox medicine.