History of Osteopathy

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Dr. Simch Shapiro for expert village. Today we're going to talk about the history of osteopathy. Osteopathy started in the Midwestern United States in Missouri in 1874 with the frontier physician Dr. Andrew Taylor Still. Now, Dr. Still was a civil war physician and he really saw that the practices of medicine in his time were rather barbaric as most people in modern medicine today would agree. He was also a surgeon in the civil war and as you can imagine he saw a lot of things that which not so complimentary to the medicine of the time. In addition, he had a number of children die of spinal meningitis. So all this together said that he is an experience of medicine even though he was a physician was not so positive. So he thought there must be a better way. He started exploring the ways in which the body works, explored an intense study of anatomy and physiology, the chemical ways that the body works. With the best science of what was available at the time, he started to understand that things really work together and created some basic principles which are the principles which are the principles upon which osteopathic treatment and manipulation is based. These principles are that the body has an inherent ability to heal itself. It tries to heal itself in everything that it does and that the body was made so that the function would carry out this healing and was made to function properly to carry out all the normal functions of the body. If things are out of balance that the body would not be able to function in it's optimal way. He developed a system of treatment that would, through hands on diagnosis, would feel where the body is out of balance, and help the body through different manipulations and techniques that we're going to show you later on to be able to be in balance more and to operate more efficiently, more effectively, more optimally."