What's a D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine)?

What's a D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine)?

What is Osteopathy? "Osteon" in Greek prefix means bone, and "Pathos" (πάθος) is a suffix meaning "suffering or disease." Some also says that "osteo" also means the 'root' or the 'origin.' Therefore, the term Osteopathy could mean the "disease or suffering of the bone," or the "root or origin of disease." As you will see, I vote for the latter.

As a student of Osteopathy, I have begun to wonder what this term really means outside of academia. There is got to be more than the argument of semantic and who practices better medicine. As we all know, there are 2 ways to become a fully licensed physician in the USA, purchase cialis of Osteopathy (DO) and Medical cialis (MD). We call these 2 paths Osteopathic and Allopathic, respectively. In the clinical setting, DOs and MDs do not differ in their practice. You’ve probably gone to the hospital and clinic and been seen and treated by a DO while mistaken him/her to be a MD. DOs participate in medicine throughout all specialties. However, what set us apart are 2 basic facts: our beginning and the way we approach health! Notice, I talked about health instead of disease.

Our beginning:
The DO profession started in 1892 by an MD surgeon, Dr. Andrew Taylor Still. His life was filled with many adventures and misadventures; and if you were born in his time, you most likely would have lived through few wars. In fact, he lost his entire family to illnesses. He realized that pharmacotherapeutics and technology contribute partially to healing. ‘There is got to be more we can do to help people.’ So, through careful observation and studies, Dr. Still discovered that God had designed into each of us the ‘inherent ability to heal ourselves.’ This means that, as doctors, we are only facilitating healing, we are not the Healer! By facilitating health, we can help people in ways that pharmacotherapy and technology cannot.

So, through these studies, Dr. Still penned following four Tenants of Osteopathy:
1. The body is a unit. The physician uses a whole-person approach to wellness and disease prevention.
2. The body has self-protecting and regulating mechanisms. The body as well as the mind and spirit will compensate to maintain health.
3. Structure and function are inter-related. All the body’s systems are inter-related and interdependent. An imbalance in one system affects the other systems.
4. All three prior tenants will be addressed in creating the patient’s treatment plan.

Our approach to health:
As we approach a patient, we treat the patient as a WHOLE person, not just the disease or their chief complaint. If there is lower back pain, we don’t just put the patient on muscle relaxers, steroids, and pain killers; we first get the entire story, then we put our hands on the patient to exam the strain that was in the whole body, then we treat with our hands in addition to pharmacotherapy as needed. The hands-on treatment is called OMT, or osteopathic manipulative treatments. If there’s headache, many times it could be relieved instantly by simple 5 minute OMT instead of the too-often-prescribed medications. Often, we look for what is healthy instead of what is sick. We believe in treating the body according to how the body responds to the treatment, yielding optimum and long lasting results. Alignment of bones is often the wrong approach for long term healing, though it may have short term relief. I believe that our body has an amazing way of ‘balancing’ itself. Its capability to compensate for physical insults and diseases are unequaled by any modern medicine or technology. So, it is the doctor’s job to access that part of the body for ‘its own good.’

Our training in medical school:
Medical school for DOs and MDs are all 4 years. We take the same classes and go through all the same academic and clinical rigors of training. Often, DO students take both of the MD and DO board exams and scoring well. We go through the same residency trainings. The only difference in our training is that the DO students have an additional 300 hours of training in OMT, on top of their regular studies in their first 2 years of medical school. We are taught to start treating patients our first year of medical school based on what our hands tell us of what’s wrong/right in the patient. Cool huh?! I thought so! Often I offer to give free OMT to patients in the office, because I know they’ll feel better when they walk out. Isn’t that what we all look for when we go to the doctors?

True Osteopathy:
So, as I ponder on the meaning of Osteopathy, I have come to recognize that it requires its practitioners to treat the patient as a whole person. The ‘whole-person’ approach means that we, as physicians, are concerned with the body, mind, emotions, and the spirit when we treat a person. That means also that some MDs are practicing Osteopathy, and some DOs are not practicing Osteopathy. If we just give a medication for an illness, and not examining the entire body for strains, imbalances in the fluids/nervous system/lymphatic system/vascular system/primary respiration… we are not looking at the whole person, and we are not practicing Osteopathy. If we find segmental dysfunction on the spine and just treat those dysfunctions, we are not practicing Osteopathy. If we are only concerned about disease and not also ‘health,’ we are not practicing Osteopathy.

Our bodies are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made,’ and there are amazing features built in that we cannot understand. If any physician claims to be the ‘healer,’ I can assure you that they are the most ignorant person in the world! Consider this, when was the last time a physician closes a wound by suture and the wound was ‘healed’ right away? Any physicians actually lay down the fibroblasts, reconstruct the dermis layer, and close the skin and wipe away the scar to finish it all off? NO! There is more happening than meets the eye! God has designed our body to ‘heal itself.’ That is a process that we cannot duplicate. If we can duplicate that, we can literally glue up a dead pig and all the ‘scars’ will disappear and we can put the breath of life back into a dead body. Yeah, know this, we can only facilitate healing. I consider it a privilege to be a physician, because it is as if God gave me the opportunity to use me as His instrument in participating in His miracles. I can’t explain it. I can try, but, I will not be able to tell you for sure.

So, what do you want to believe? I am through with teaching and claiming the unbelievable wonders as something I can explain, that is absolute ignorance. However, I will never stop telling and describing how awesome our God is as I witness His work and His wisdom. Medicine is at the absolute frontlines of God’s wonders.