Osteopathy

The osteopath is the mechanic of the human body.

Like the wheels of a car can be out of balance, so can joints get out of balance by a wrong mechanical load. One can understand this quite literally!

The wrong balance of a joint is caused by an articular restriction. In osteopathy an articular restriction is defined as a lack of movement of a joint.

Such a retstiction is not visible on an X-ray or a scan. It can only be found by doing movement tests. And for an X-ray or a scan every movement is absolutely prohibited! (Exception is made for the spine where a restriction can be made visible in some way). These articular restrictions impede the movements and postures of the body as a whole.

You have to keep in mind that all the joints and muscles in the body cooperate to establish a certain movement or posture.

In this respect the body functions as a company where every employee has his task to achieve the best result. When one employee doesn’t do his job properly, the company might not be bothered to much. However, when to many employees do a bad job, the company as a whole will not function properly.

In terms of osteopathy, we are talking about restricted joints and hypertonic muscles. Every adult has one or a few restricted joints, or a hypertonic muscle. This is normal and we won’t be bothered much by it, because all the other joints and muscles will work together to “compensate” this situation. However, when there are to many restrictions, this mechanism of compensation will fail. You will become aware of the fact that something goes wrong. The stiffness in the movement becomes noticeable and you get pain.

The presence of restricted joints has certain consequences:

• muscles, tendons and joints will begin to suffer from mechanical overload. This leads to muscle tensions, sometimes to tendonitis or to bursitis, and certainly to advanced ware and tear of the cartilage.

• this mechanical overload will cause pain somewhere, the causative block will not necessarily be found there where the pain is!

• by the impeded local movement the local circulation will get less dynamic, sometimes also in the abdomen (this has nothing to do with arteriosclerosis!)

• the posture is disturbed, sometimes the pelvis gets “distorted” which can lead to an apparent leg length discrepancy

• as a consequence of a to high level of muscle tension there can be a local nerve irritation with symptoms similar to sciatica and hernia. If there is osteoarthritis in the neck or lumbars, its possible that the doctor will attribute these symptoms entirely (but wrongly!) to the osteoarthritis. And then you might get the message “sorry but you will have to learn to live with it”.

Very often osteopathic manipulative treatment will give a good improvement of the symptoms.

Cost of osteopathic treatment – Free diagnosis possible!

Price per session: €65,-