Osteopathy was structured in the late nineteenth century, in the United States by a physician and surgeon named Andrew Taylor Still. He was the first to highlight the interrelationships that exist, on the one hand between the musculoskeletal system and other organic systems, and on the other hand, between the mobility and freedom of these different systems and the health of man.
Fundamental principles of Osteopathy
It is a manual therapy that helps to alleviate, correct and recover musculoskeletal injuries and organic pathologies. Although Osteopathy is fundamentally related to problems affecting the locomotor system, it is true that it treats the human being globally, as a whole, restoring the disturbed balance through manual techniques directed at any of the affected tissues, whether these are musculoskeletal, visceral, nervous system etc.
Classification of Osteopathy
The manual technological development of Osteopathy, by influencing all the aforementioned tissues, has led to the classification of techniques in several large groups, depending on which tissues they act on. So, we talk about:
- Structural osteopathy
- Visceral osteopathy
- Cranial osteopathy and Craniosacral therapy
La osteopatía funciona, por tanto, respetando y facilitando la autorregulación del organismo en cualquier patología y no tanto en hacerlo dependiente de soluciones puramente externas o pasivas, como es la utilización, a veces excesiva, de medicamentos.
Osteopathy works, therefore, respecting and facilitating the self-regulation of the organism in any pathology and not so much in making it dependent on purely external or passive solutions, as is the use, sometimes excessive, of medicines. Osteopathy, in a context of holistic approach, through global bio-medical-psycho-social models, promotes or recovers the homeostasis or mechanical balance of the musculoskeletal, nervous, visceral, circulatory body tissues etc, and does so with the application of manual techniques directed to tissues identified as pathological in osteopathic functional diagnosis.
