I enjoyed reading the introduction to this book, but it sadly only served to reinforce my confused feelings about visceral osteopathy. Whilst it talked about all sorts of exciting possibilities, the reality of the content was a pile of statements from experience.
I still love the idea of affecting mobility, and am completely on board with the idea that a reduction in mobility will affect function, but just not so sure about motility. And mentions of "awareness of the phenomena only from our own experience" do nothing to encourage me.
It scarcely seems different in places to the parts of Still's "Philosophy of Osteopathy" where he describes all tumours and swellings as stemming from a failure of drainage, whether it be venous, lymphatic, or nervous.
I fully understand that research has to start with individual experience and case studies, but am sad that in this case, it also appears to have stopped there.
Another interesting part was how specific they are about the effect of treatment - "we usually see a patient three times and ask him to return six months or one year after the last treatment". This sounds incredible, but to think of the psychological effect of telling someone not that they are cured, but that the healing process has been allowed to continue, and they will continue to see improvements over the next six months must be amazing. Especially when dealing with visceral conditions which are stress related (and whether they are not originated from stress, which can continue without some aspect?) this must have a tremendous positive effect. It is so different from my current principle of wait and see, come back in a week or two...
In fact, I have started experimenting with moving outside the usual paradigm of come back every week indefinitely to try to gauge the change in treatment effect. So far, things seem very similar! Useful for patients in terms of cost, and maybe for me, if there are sufficient people to keep things going!
Beyond this, I found myself not dismissing, but finding that the techniques in the book fell broadly into the sort of categories I had mentally assigned to visceral work - taking hold fairly locally (now "direct technique") and more distally, using other things to affect the local viscus ("indirect technique" although this also explicitly mentions the use of a longer lever like a limb).
I still love the idea of affecting mobility, and am completely on board with the idea that a reduction in mobility will affect function, but just not so sure about motility. And mentions of "awareness of the phenomena only from our own experience" do nothing to encourage me.
It scarcely seems different in places to the parts of Still's "Philosophy of Osteopathy" where he describes all tumours and swellings as stemming from a failure of drainage, whether it be venous, lymphatic, or nervous.
I fully understand that research has to start with individual experience and case studies, but am sad that in this case, it also appears to have stopped there.
Another interesting part was how specific they are about the effect of treatment - "we usually see a patient three times and ask him to return six months or one year after the last treatment". This sounds incredible, but to think of the psychological effect of telling someone not that they are cured, but that the healing process has been allowed to continue, and they will continue to see improvements over the next six months must be amazing. Especially when dealing with visceral conditions which are stress related (and whether they are not originated from stress, which can continue without some aspect?) this must have a tremendous positive effect. It is so different from my current principle of wait and see, come back in a week or two...
In fact, I have started experimenting with moving outside the usual paradigm of come back every week indefinitely to try to gauge the change in treatment effect. So far, things seem very similar! Useful for patients in terms of cost, and maybe for me, if there are sufficient people to keep things going!
Beyond this, I found myself not dismissing, but finding that the techniques in the book fell broadly into the sort of categories I had mentally assigned to visceral work - taking hold fairly locally (now "direct technique") and more distally, using other things to affect the local viscus ("indirect technique" although this also explicitly mentions the use of a longer lever like a limb).