There are many ways of doing the exact same thing. This is a mindset that I have that I try to teach to everyone I work with. I would like to share with you some ideas on healing that haven't been presented to the masses yet.
I am an osteopathic physician. I work mainly in the Emergency Department, being trained that way. Currently, I have limited my outside work so I can return to a "residency" and do another year of training so I can become certified in the dying art of Neuromuscular Medicine aka Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine. This is usually abbreviated as NMM/OMM.
I would like to start with a little background of my art (art of medicine) and then share with you weekly the difference an osteopath can make.
Osteopathic medicine was started by a country doctor who was tired of the medicine of his time not doing any good. Andrew Taylor Still was born in Kentucky, mainly grew up in Missouri and was practicing in Kansas when disease took the lives of most of his family. During most of six months in a depressed funk, he started asking himself why he lived and they died. (I am paraphrasing the story; it actually is really good.) He developed manual medicine skills that were so powerful that he was excommunicated from his church where he was a lay minister, simply for "practicing the laying on of hands." He found a place in Missouri that simply ignored him and there he built a following of patients so powerful that three trains a day of patients were coming in to see him or his students.
The MD (or allopathic) physicians have tried to rule the medical pie since the American Medical Association was created. The DO (or osteopathic) physicians have been trying for years to show that they are as good or better than their medical cousins, sometimes by leaving behind their skills in osteopathic manipulation. Now, DO's have been accepted as full physicians, AS LONG AS they don't do that voodoo medicine. Just look up quackwatch!. Many MD's are suspicious of this manual medicine that they haven't learned.
BUT! Now the MD world is taking to the Neuromuscular Medicine/Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine and requesting it be used! Currently, I just finished working a month with a mentor and attending physician Dr Beck at the Maine Medical Center. Dr Beck is an Emergency Medicine physician, who morphed into doing in-hospital osteopathic manipulation. He has been doing only in-hospital treatments over the last five years. We treated patients in the hospital with problems ranging from back pain, to respiratory failure, to narcotic withdrawal in neonates! We treated up to 1/10th of the hospital census at any day this month. Maine Medical Center is a large tertiary center (which means it is a huge hospital with hundreds of patients in all fields of medicine). His service is getting larger and larger.
What I would like to share with you over the next many weeks is just how osteopathy is more than a word, but a mindset and an art. Please, leave feed back and questions! I don't promise to know everything, but I would like to share what I am passionate about.
Respectfully, Michael Chipman, D.O.
