I cherish those days I spent with John Werham. Flying back and from from Canada to the UK over several years, because what he did for me personally was a gift. He instilled a fire in me. A fire for osteopathy. He was a very committed man. John Wernham brought me back to a different time of osteopathy. John and his students were using a Body Adjustment (BA) which is a form of a general osteopathic treatment. Perhaps some might disagree, but the BA was a full body routine, a repetitive method of treating and it was helpful to my practice initially.
At this time I was deeply entrenched in A. T. Still, Tasker, Hewlett, Hazard. These were the people that were triggering my inquiry and I thought I would find a similar sort of inquiry among my UK colleagues. But when I got to the UK I recognized that they were not interested in A. T. Still at all. They had a different view of osteopathy and that was the view of John Martin Littlejohn. While in the UK I was told that although A. T. Still discovered osteopathy, it was John Martin Littlejohn who understood osteopathy, because he put it in the path of physiology where it should be. The people that I was working with were very physiological in their understanding of osteopathy but this was in direct contrast to the original writings that Dr. Still was discussing in my opinion.
After a few years of being a student in the UK, John passed away. Gail Roots, the school manager, a lovely lady, asked me to be a pallbearer at his funeral in Rochester. I helped carry John into the church with others from his team. It was an honor to be part of that day. I liked John so much; for his character, for who he was, for the man he was osteopathically. Now I can see that he was really devoted to a certain individual, John Martin Littlejohn. Whereas I was devoted to osteopathy and a different individual, A. T. Still. But I respect John Wernham for everything that he has done. He inspired many and he continues Inspire many. He and I had so many private conversations. We got along very well and I liked him. He was a very bombastic, highly opinionated, strong charactered individual and his beliefs were unshakable. Whether or not you believe in what John was teaching, you have to respect that man.
After John Wernham died, I travelled to the UK periodically, my own school, the CAO was in full swing and we were frequently associating with the Institue of Classical Osteopathy (ICO). There was a project my students were very interested in doing. They wanted to take the Littlejohn charts and map them out neurologically. They were having a difficult time making sense of these charts and that took us into some inquiry. When in conversation around it, the relationship between the CAO and the ICO started to decay and eventually we parted ways. As an educator I have to be very cognizant and very careful as to what I say about osteopathic work, generally speaking. I can’t be making claims or comments that are not substantiated in some sort of sensible science. That’s always the case at my school, the CAO. We are very careful in what we teach, how we move forward, what we say, and what we don’t say. I can’t be teaching something for which I don’t have any scientific evidence to prove it on some level. This experience pushed me into a position as an educator and as a practitioner where I needed to get more information about what osteopathy is and what osteopathy is not. I needed to be resolute in that information. This pursuit took me to Kirksville, Missouri.
