When someone says the word disease, what do you think of? Cancer? Diabetes? While these are definitely very serious diseases, the term “disease” encompasses so much more. In fact, any time there is even the slightest alteration in the function of any of your organs you will experience dis-ease. Therein lies the root of the word itself. The word disease comes from the Old French word desaise, des meaning “without” and aise meaning “ease”. In other words, disease occurs when your organs function without ease.
It is clear that this “lack of ease” is something that most people either don’t want to live with or can’t live with. It is at this point that most people will consult their family doctor, searching for an answer. They will ask: what is happening to me? And why? Typically this leads to a medical diagnosis in which the doctor says that x disease is causing y symptom…but is it really the disease that is causing the symptom or is the disease an effect of some other cause?
This is where the osteopathic philosophy comes in. One of the core beliefs in osteopathy is that all diseases are effects. In other words, the disease was caused by something, it did not simply start out of nowhere. The job of the Osteopathic Practitioner is to identify the cause, and he/she will find it in the anatomy. More specifically, if there is dis-ease, there will be an obstruction to the proper blood supply, nerve supply, venous and lymphatic drainage somewhere in the body. All tissues of the body need these four things in order to function properly, and when they don’t get them, it leads to dis-ease. The obstruction can be palpated by the Osteopathic Practitioner and corrected with manual manipulation.
This is a different philosophy than most people are used to. However, searching for and finding the root cause of a health concern instead of taking a medication in order to control the symptoms is becoming more and more mainstream. This is because simply put, it works. Correcting a problem at its source just makes sense, don’t you think?
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