Slashdot Mirror

Put simply, I think that, in general, D.O.'s tend to have more tools in the toolbox when it comes to diagnosis.

Some D.O.s have a more tools in their toolbox when it comes to treatment, too. All Osteopathic medical students are required to take courses in "Osteopathic Manipulation", which is very appropriate in many cases.

http://osteohome.com/ is a nice site run by a D.O. who actually uses his hands-on training... Most don't, some use it occasionally, and a few specialize in it. Cayce sometimes advocated osteopathic treatments, and Dr. Reilly has a very nice book: http://books.google.com/books?id=nZHTAJDgozoC

I'm a little late to the discussion, but this I have to say...

The other side of the coin is that a person can be feeling pain or discomfort that is "left over" from an injury that has already healed. Perhaps they changed their posture or gait after the injury and never readjusted after it healed.

The body stores trauma from an injury in the fascia. The fascial tissue is the web that holds the body together - most people are familiar with it as the thin tissue that's between the fat and the meat on a steak.

The review mentioned Chiropractic, but didn't say if the book said anything about Osteopathic Manipulation. Both use hands-on treatment. Chiropractors' specificity in treatment is like using a sledgehammer. Basically, chiropractors are taught to 'crack bones', applying pressure to move spinal vertebrae back into place. Some chiropractors learn more advanced techniques after graduation. Proper Osteopathic manipulation is like using a sniper rifle.

The basic premise of Osteopathic Medicine is that structure and function are interrelated. If a bone is out of its proper place the organs affected won't work as optimally as they should. For example, a displaced rib might be exerting pressure on the spleen, which would compromise immune function.

The founder of Osteopathic Medicine, Andrew Taylor Still, said that "Muscles move bones, and nerves control muscles", and taught his students how to use their hands to calm the nerves, thereby improving the body's structure. One of Dr. Still's early students, Dr. Sutherland, advanced Dr. Still's teachings greatly, and others have since built on Dr. Sutherland's work.

There's a lot to cover on this topic, and I can't do the field justice in a short slashdot post. If you'd like more information, Eric Dolgin, D.O.'s site has some excellent information. Also see Chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing (your library should have a copy).

I will add my anecdote here. I took my then-new girlfriend to my Osteopath after she got back from Mexico in Feb. 2007. It was a class trip, and she'd had a rough time. She could hardly turn her head because of a problem with her neck. Lymph nodes in the neck were swelling up, and she wanted to go to the hospital. I convinced her to hold off for a couple days, so we could get to Dr. Davidson 100 miles away first.

He had a student with him that day. After having her lie face down on her table, he said that a rib or two were out of place. (This was most likely caused by her carrying a heavy sack across the one shoulder for a week or two). He did his thing to put the ribs back in their places, and said that the lymph node should go down over the next couple days. Since she was a new patient, he said that she should get an X-ray if the problem persisted longer than a week, just to cover his ass.

Over the next week, the swollen lymph nodes went away, and her normal ability to turn her head returned.

Just an anecdote, doesn't mean anything. Right?

I'm a little late to the discussion, but this I have to say...

The other side of the coin is that a person can be feeling pain or discomfort that is "left over" from an injury that has already healed. Perhaps they changed their posture or gait after the injury and never readjusted after it healed.

The body stores trauma from an injury in the fascia. The fascial tissue is the web that holds the body together - most people are familiar with it as the thin tissue that's between the fat and the meat on a steak.

The review mentioned Chiropractic, but didn't say if the book said anything about Osteopathic Manipulation. Both use hands-on treatment. Chiropractors' specificity in treatment is like using a sledgehammer. Basically, chiropractors are taught to 'crack bones', applying pressure to move spinal vertebrae back into place. Some chiropractors learn more advanced techniques after graduation. Proper Osteopathic manipulation is like using a sniper rifle.

The basic premise of Osteopathic Medicine is that structure and function are interrelated. If a bone is out of its proper place the organs affected won't work as optimally as they should. For example, a displaced rib might be exerting pressure on the spleen, which would compromise immune function.

The founder of Osteopathic Medicine, Andrew Taylor Still, said that "Muscles move bones, and nerves control muscles", and taught his students how to use their hands to calm the nerves, thereby improving the body's structure. One of Dr. Still's early students, Dr. Sutherland, advanced Dr. Still's teachings greatly, and others have since built on Dr. Sutherland's work.

There's a lot to cover on this topic, and I can't do the field justice in a short slashdot post. If you'd like more information, Eric Dolgin, D.O.'s site has some excellent information. Also see Chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing (your library should have a copy).

I will add my anecdote here. I took my then-new girlfriend to my Osteopath after she got back from Mexico in Feb. 2007. It was a class trip, and she'd had a rough time. She could hardly turn her head because of a problem with her neck. Lymph nodes in the neck were swelling up, and she wanted to go to the hospital. I convinced her to hold off for a couple days, so we could get to Dr. Davidson 100 miles away first.

He had a student with him that day. After having her lie face down on her table, he said that a rib or two were out of place. (This was most likely caused by her carrying a heavy sack across the one shoulder for a week or two). He did his thing to put the ribs back in their places, and said that the lymph node should go down over the next couple days. Since she was a new patient, he said that she should get an X-ray if the problem persisted longer than a week, just to cover his ass.

Over the next week, the swollen lymph nodes went away, and her normal ability to turn her head returned.

Just an anecdote, doesn't mean anything. Right?

I guess I'm wondering- are modern medical advances really as expensive as we're led to believe they are in America?

The real advances in modern medicine are the cheap ones that actually treat the root causes of a problem. Nutrition, Osteopathic Manipulation, IV therapies (w/ vitamins, EDTA, H202, and others), Energy Medicine, etc.

Most the other 'advances' can best be explained as 'profiteering' - clinics have to pay for for their $million+ MRI machine somehow, and the handful of cases a month where they're actually justified isn't going to pay the bills..

See links on how healthcare became screwed up, read Dr. Davidson's testimonial pages for examples of conditions which respond well to Cranial Osteopathy, check out Donna Eden's system of Energy Medicine, and get yourself a copy of Dr. Reilly's Handbook for Health Through Drugless Therapy, and I'm sure you can easily get your intestine flowing freely again.

Osteopathy is the knowledge of the structure, relation and function of each part of the human body applied to the adjustment or correction of whatever interferes with the harmonious operation of the same.

George V. Webster, D.O. 1921 (source)

Neurofascial release works essentially at the level of one type of connective tissue which is called the "fascia". The connective tissue is the glue which holds us together by connecting one part of the body to another. In addition, it makes up the compartments and coverings of other tissues and organs, and it is even connected to itself, all in a very complex and organized way. Therefore, the connective tissue structurally unifies the body, giving it much of its strength and support. This is a unique function which is not performed by any of the other body tissues.

Experts tell us that we "live in our fascia" as though it was a body suit. One indication of the quality of our health is how well this "body suit" functions. Injuries can affect many of our tissues, but especially our fascia. The site of the injury usually causes a local problem, but there is a great deal of truth to the expression, "When my toe hurts, my whole body hurts". A pull or twist in the fascia can also be transmitted along all of its connections, making it possible to produce distant problems as well. When our "body suit" fails to function properly, we can experience pain, headaches, restricted range of motion, and many other problems affecting our general health.

-http://healthabounds2.com/neurofasc.htm

Greg: The way you laid the book [Death By Modern Medicine] out is fantastic. You start out Chapter 1 with the title, "Death by Modern Medical Doctors." Tell us more about that?

Carolyn: A certain mentality exists in medicine where medical doctors believe they should have a monopoly on everything to do with a person's health. Anybody who does something other than treatments with drugs or surgery becomes the enemy. This mentality existed long before I became a medical doctor.

The history of modern medicine began in America with a survey that was done by Abraham Flexner. It was called the Flexner Report. Flexner was an educational reformer who was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to survey North American medical schools. Flexner had fallen in love with the German scientific model of education when he visited Berlin in 1906. He began to see this as the way to set up the North American medical education system. The German model was based on science and lab medicine using drugs, science, and treating very, very ill people.

In medical school, doctors are trained in the extremes of medicine (emergency and surgical medicine). But then when they go into practice, 80 percent of the patients have conditions that are lifestyle oriented (aches, pains, fatigue etc...). In medical school, students aren't trained in the area of diet and lifestyle.

Over the past 100 years this mentality has caused medicine to treat normal individuals with abnormal therapies -- drugs and surgeries. To me, that became the basis of the modern medical monopoly and how we have been brainwashed into thinking this is the way it should be and it's not.

I'm a naturopathic doctor as well as a medical doctor. I always held out hope that naturopathic medicine would fill in this gap. ...

-Death by Modern Medicine, emphasis added

With respect to doctors, a similar situation has been put in place. We have basically outlawed all Chevy doctors who focus on the less expensive minor health problems (which is, in fact, all that most people have) and are forced instead to use Mercedes doctors who charge Mercedes prices even for ailments that can be fixed by people with significantly less training.

-Uncertainty and Its Exigencies: The Critical Role of Insurance in the Free Market

My two-year-old daughter had mumps in February - diagnosis was confirmed in hospital although no explanation given as to why the MMR vaccine had failed. My seven-year-old, who had MMR at 14 months and the pre-school booster is suffering now.
Justine, Buckinghamshire

People seem to be under the misapprehension that it individuals who have not been vaccinated against mumps who are being affected. This is simply not true. All my children had all their vaccination as and when they should have. My 17 year old son is just recovering from mumps. Is this vaccination really that successful?
Linda, York

I was born in 1986, and I have had the MMR and a booster, yet I still had mumps last November, along with many other students at my university who had also had the MMR, so it seems even those who have been vaccinated are at risk.
Lindsey, Cambridge

-comments from Cases of Mumps soaring across UK

I have to take special care of my upper back and neck since a car accident a few years ago.

this one's simple. Car accident induces "trauma" in the body's fascial (connective) tissue. If the body's stored trauma level is low, the new trauma is simply absorbed without any other symptoms. Every body has a carrying capacity for "trauma", and as long as that cup is less than full there are no problems. But as soon as the body's trauma carrying capacity is exceeded, symptoms will result.

The solution is simply to "empty the cup". All the crutches in the world (you mention mattress, pillow, MSM/glucosamine chondrotin, getting up every once in a while) are ineffective so long as the body is "stiffened" from traumas previously incurred. Cranial manipulation is the best method I've found... Either Cranial Osteopathy or Cranio-Sacral Therapy (from a Registered Cranio-Sacral Therapist [RCST]).

See The Nature of Trauma and Osteopathic Treatment Questions. (Both these doctors use an advanced form of cranial manipulation known as the Biodynamic model...)

I've some comments on osteopathy in my comment history, so you might want to subscribe and browse the older ones (surely #'s 24-48 will have at least one, and the first one you find will link to even older comments...) for more on my experience thereof.

I personally suffered from depression combined with panic disorder that set in approximately two years ago. Since then I have been taking Lexapro which effectively treated my depression and continues to treat my panic disorder.

So you were fine for years & years, and then two years ago everything changed and you've been on anti-depressants ever since? This is why us anti-pharmaceutical types get all hot under the collar when people say that some people are just broken, and need the benefits of modern drugs.

I myself have had great success controlling compulsive behavior with Cranial Osteopathic treatments (see case #10). After a few visits the doctor was like, "fixed your misshappen head" (I'd had a blow to the chin 7 years before, don't remember 2 weeks, and ever since I'd always thought that something didn't seem quite right about my head, but I didn't realize what it was), then a few weeks later, "finally got your head working right - when I first started working with you, it was like a disorganized bag of sand." Something about restoring proper cerebro-spinal fluid flow in the brain...

Met a psychologist years ago that said she had much, much better results with her clients when she sent them for cranio-sacral therapy (non-monopoly cranial osteopathic manipulation) and "Network Spinal Analysis" (a gentle offshoot of chiropractic) too.

Then there's always 'accupuncture' for emotions, which has worked mircales for hundreds of thousands of people.

And there's also the old standby, Hypnosis.

I'm of the opinion that antidepressants just cover up the actual problem, analogous to giving someone who's just broken their leg Morphine for the pain, but not bothering to set and cast it so the bones can heal properly.

I agree with the Anti-AMA/medical monopoly crowd.

If your general surgeon f's up your gastric bypass surgery because he was not adequately trained, and you get transferred to ICU and...

While it's true that lots of people are having the "surgery of the week" (gastric bypass), I wonder how our ancestors avoided morbid obesity without the availability of Gastric Bypass Surgery.

Not really. Gastric bypass is yet another example of the allopathic (a derogatory term coined by a homeopath) philosophy of treating the symptom while ignoring the cause, or perhaps, treating the symptom because they don't know what else to do. $20,000 (gastric bypass costs range from $17-24k) could get you a full treatment program with a competent hypnotist, several years worth of organic vegetables and natural foods, and a handy rainy-day fund to boot. But if insurance covers a $20,000 surgery, why should the fatty care what it costs?

My grandfather says the only thing he really remembers about Milton Erickson was how he was always "bitching" about having to learn anatomy, go to med school & residency, etc (Milton was an M.D./psychiatrist), when all he really wanted to do was hypnosis. Over the course of his career, Doctor Erickson "fixed" more people than the entire psychiatric establishment combined, and medical school was mostly irrelevant to the skills he had.

The emphasis on specialties causes a vast case of "missing the forest for the trees", which has led to medical costs rising out of control. Soon no one will be able to afford your services, so you might want to start learning about cost-effective options now, before you're unemployed. See, for example, Dr. Zieve's book Healthy Medicine: A Guide to the Emergence of Sensible, Comprehensive Care. I'm a big fan of osteopathic manipulation too, as another skill in the quiver that everyone should at least know is available.

Had shooting pains up & down my right forearm, triggered by excessive use of the trackpoint on an IBM Thinkpad 600E.

"No Problem," I thought, "I have two index fingers. I'll just switch to using my left hand to operate the pointing device."

Before long, I had shooting pains up & down my left forearm too. Brilliant.

(modern osteopathic technique is the greatest. Pay special attention to the page on vision. See this tree of my /. comments too.)

Cranial Osteopathy

A three-year-old little girl was scheduled to have eye surgery, a
shortening of the eye muscles, then eye-patches for three weeks, while
strapped into a crib at the children's hospital. The parents were
told that she would probably need similar surgery at least twice
before completing high school. She was taken to a cranial osteopathic
medical doctor for help. He found that the left occipital base of her
skull had been pushed forward and up high, probably at birth, and that
due to pressure on the visual cortex, the eye muscles could never work
properly. He added that **all serious visual disturbances in children
were usually the result of cranial compression that occurred during
birth, or from a fall**. Following the visit, the cranial osteopath
requested that the little girl's thick glasses be removed since he
believed her vision would improve greatly overnight. The next morning
her 20/400 vision was 20/20, and the strabysmus had completely
resolved. (emphasis added)
-Healthy Medicine, pg 145

America's 20th Century industry was so obsessed with drugs ...

Seeking health is by necessity an individualized process. Medicine is a "practice" and not a "science" because everyone responds differently, sometimes radically, sometimes ever so slightly, to the same treatment protocol.

The obsession with drugs came about by certain interests hijacking the medical education process (AMA, Flexner report, etc), standardizing on allopathic modalities (suppressing or treating the symptoms with drugs - tylenol for a fevor, shot to boost red blood cell count, etc), and lobbying to to suppress all alternatives. This allows for moneyed interests on Wall Street to profiteer on an otherwise private transaction, by artificially making their high-priced product an integral part of the medical process.

Some professions have succeeded in counter-lobbying for their right to practice too, with Osteopathic being the only full-privledged of the alternatives (though most D.O.s have been subsumed into medical orthodoxy with only a handful today implementing Dr. Still's revelation in their practice). Chiropractic and naturopathy are two of the others. I'm not a big fan of chiropractic, but it has its uses. Not familiar with naturopathy, Osteopathic Manipulation is the greatest. (see my comment history :).

  100 years of Medical Robery
  Real Medical Freedom

Drugs and surgery have their places, but usually some other therapy is called for.

(I took my grandmother out to Mayo Clinic weekly for six months for a $1k injection of some drug to boost her red blood cell count. She had bone cancer, and was also undergoing various chemotherapies - her doctor was "practicing" on her. After 6 months and $50k+ spent on her behalf by Medicare/supplemental, she started hospice care, and finished in a week. Doctor: "oops, lost another one. Maybe these drugs will work on the next patient..." Total waste of money, time and effort.)

During one of our early sessions (about a year ago, for me it seems like quite a long time), you said something about about the work being something like "peeling an onion" [in that the "trauma"/"lesions" comes off in layers]. I like the analogy, but I've settled on something slightly different for my own personal case.

My body's condition is something like a bonfire. Big logs of firewood were set at birth. Bumps & falls added to the pile, and another load of combustibles were added when I sustained the head injury almost 8 years ago. Even carrying around this big load, I was relatively stable. Then I went off to college, and the laptop & all-nighters on projects were the sparks that set the stack on fire.

Osteopathic treatment is like removing the wood from the fire. Fire Fighter [Doctor Osteopathic] comes along, "let's see what we can get at today," and pulls out the biggest pieces of firewood that are accessible. The fire goes into hibernation for a bit, until I go and stir it up again with the computer/whatever.

At first I didn't notice much of anything [from the osteopathic treatments]. But no one had ever recognized the fire before, so I stuck with it, and after a while, "neat - the fire is starting to go down..."

My little status reports are biased towards optimism - "Fire's down by 5% this week!" But the 2 or 3 weeks between appointments still drag, with the fire fully flared up after a week or so.

I've gone & poured liquid oxygen on my little 10% pile of firewood [the time before last he said the level of trauma in my body was 10% of what it was a year ago, when I started treatment with him] over the last couple of days, and it's all flared up again, with something new this time - a distinct pressure on the left side of C1 [1st cervical vertebrae], I think. And ... "T1" [1st thoracic vertebrae] has been clunking real good...

... or rather, just covers them up.

Sorry to hear about your eyes. My mom had LASIK surgery 10 years ago, and got the Monovision setup. While she's happy with the results, I'm certain the Monovision is responsible for her weight gain, immune disfunction, and overall lack of energy. (She had a case of the shingles recently, and she's only 53. Shingles is usually developed by much older people.) Did you have the monovision setup? If so, I'd definitely suggest getting a lense for the closeup eye...

I asked my doctor (see the paragraphs about how my prescription has been changing) what he could do with a person who'd already had LASIK surgery. He said that, while he'd ideally get to them before the surgery, he could still release some of the "trauma" incurred by the surgery itself...

Muscles are what pull the eye out of shape. Lasik resurfaces the front of the eyeball, but doesn't do anything about the muscles locked in spasm (if anyone wants to refute this, please explain why my 22 year old brother's prescription has been getting stronger of late, and why my prescription has changed so much over the past year). The "See Clearly Method" (and other "natural" vision improvement programs) use relaxation & exercises to release the tension from these muscles. Osteopathic manipulation is the missing master-key from all vision improvement programs.

My doctor says there's only about a hundred who do the osteopathic vision prescription thing, so I'm at a loss to help you find a doctor like mine.. Jealous' site has a couple of doctor's names ("teaching staff"), so I'd start there. The only other osteopath I know of who does vision prescriptions is Stephen Davidson (though there is no mention of the vision thing on his site).

I do not believe that many physicians would forgoe recomending inexpensive treatment...

That's because the philosophical model they were trained in is inaccurate. M.D.s are trained that a patient needs something done externally to fix the problem - surgery, drugs, etc. Still's philosophy was that 'a body will fix itself if the impediments are removed'.

Anecidotal evidence (such as you presented) means almost nothing to a scientist. Especially if this evidence comes from someone selling something (in this case, your D.O..) "Shock" is something I've never heard of. The word activates my mental "con artist" sensors.

This is just an informal post on Slashdot, which will recede into the dustbins shortly. "Shock" is what the osteopath feels in a body with his hands, but because you've never heard the term before it must be a form of con artistry? Sounds like a logical fallacy to me.

Here's a Bibliography if you're interested in persuing it. But I don't care about research. Research is useful, of course, but all that matters to me is, does it work? I'm satisfied with knowing that there's a solid theoretical basis for the treatment modality.

Eyeglass prescriptions change periodically without treatment.

I first got glasses 15 years ago. My prescription was stable until 7.5 years ago, when it got stronger by 1/4 diopter in each eye after I took a nasty bump to the head (that's how my body incurred a good deal of "trauma" or "shock"). It stayed at -2.25L, -2.75R for the next 7.5 years. I mentioned that I wore contacts to the doctor at the second or third visit, and he said, "oh really? Let's see how they are." He got behind me, put his hands on my temples, "close your eyes. Open your eyes." Instantly, "oh, these are totally wrong for you! We'll have to fix this too..." My prescription has been changing every other month, the right eye steadily racheting downward, the left eye oscillating between -2.00 and -1.75. You can say that's just a "periodic change", but I know better. :)

When D.O.s first came around, their philosophy was based on pseudo-science and quackery. Look it up.

I've read a few independant histories of Andrew Taylor Still (written by researchers, not Osteopaths), and they all say that he had a remarkable healing presence. Osteopathy is a paradigm shift. Still's philosophy states that the body wants to be healthy, and will fix itself if the impediments to health are removed. This was at a time when most doctors were drugging with mercury and doing primitive surgeries. Still's philosophy was a light in a dark age.

Today, most of them are just as useful as regular physicians.

And a handful are a thousand times more useful than a "regular" physcician. I went to several different M.D.s, and they were all frickin worthless - "you need to exercise more" *3, and one recommended a chiropractor. I did plenty of exercise, and it didn't do anything for me.

You keep using that word, "quackery", yet I don't think you know what it means. It's a concept used to subvert effective healing practices that don't rely on patented pharmaceuticals & expensive tests & procedures. Look it up.

Medicine is an art because no two bodies are the same. Every individual has a unique experience, necessitating different treatments. Identical symptoms in different bodies can be from different causes. Pharmaceutical-based medicine is silly because it treats patients as one-offs from a human assembly line, and also because it treats the symptoms and not the cause.

If someone else is paying for my healthcare, why should I care what it costs?

For example, when my grandmother was dying of cancer, Medicare and her supplemental picked up 95+% of the tab. Her doctor sent her to a nutritionist at first, as a way of acknowledging the mountain of research that proves nutrition is an important part of health. Grandma later said, "she wanted me to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day. She's CRAZY!" The doctor never mentioned nutrition again, and stuck to the high-tech/high-cost treatments he'd been trained in. She died after six months, after having spent $50k+ of other people's money.

A year ago I started seeing a Doctor of Osteopathy in the Cranial Field for some Osteopathic Manipulation. He works from a home-office, has an answering machine for an assistant, answers all his own messages, and basically does everything himself. He gives me a receipt that I can submit myself for insurance reimbursment, if I so desire. He doesn't accept insurance because a) he'd need an employee to handle the billing b) his practice is full regardless c) many insurances are likely to disallow his kind of therapy, or pay him pennies on the dollar.

In January I decided to see a homeopathic M.D. to see if there was something I could do about my cold hands. After taking an extensive history, he decided that my autonomic nervous system was probably out of balance, and injected me with novocain (same as what dentists use to numb the mouth) in a couple locations. He also gave me a couple of homeopathic remedies, and some fish oil/vitamin E at the next visit. I'm out $400 or $500 for his services, and am totally pleased with the results. He doesn't bill insurance either, also because it's not worth his time.

If I'd gone the conventional route, my insurance would've had to spend $2000 or $5000 on diagnostic tests (an MRI goes for $1000, and CAT scans aren't cheap either), $20,000 on hand surgery/whatever, and I still would've had the problem. As it is, I've spent approx $5,000 with the D.O., and I'm totally satisfied because the treatment program works.

Health Insurance should be carried for accidents, because you never know when you might have a $40,000 medical bill (like me, 8 years ago: a helicopter flight, a plane flight, a cat scan or two, 10 days in the hospital, etc...). But we should all pay our way, for the costs associated with living.

Modern Medicine has evolved with almost univeral insurance coverage, so our doctors have the mindset of "if cost were no object, what would I do?" (this is not a concious thing, but a mindset that gets passed from generation to generation of medical professionals) Which explains why there are so many $60,000 heart bypass surgeries being done, even though some researchers say that bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives, because it is almost universally incompatible with the patient's long-term outcome. I clipped a story from the paper a few weeks back about a guy who died in his 50's, 3 weeks after having a bypass operation. Re-plumbing the heart while ignoring the rest of the vascular system seems like a foolish way to go about attaining health. But it makes the heart surgeon wealthy, so why should he do anything else?

See also:
100 years of Medical Robery
Real Medical Freedom