Learning from Americans

Once I was desperate to learn osteopathy, the big question was “where am I going to learn this?” and because it was an American science I started by registering for a muscle energy course that I had found in the Philadelphia area run by Osteopathic Physicians. I wanted to learn more and they were happy to teach me but after some time, going to the United States all the time for these courses became troublesome. Soon I was approached to help begin a school in Canada for an American Osteopath. In exchange for my education, my role was to recruit students to fill a classroom. The courses were the typical kind of procedural osteopathy, rooted in technical elements that osteopaths generally tend to speak about in today’s osteopathic landscape.

During my osteopathic study I was exposed to a lot of different American DOs, older physicians who were deeply devoted to osteopathy as they were trained to do it. I had a lot of exposure to different people and these different people all taught me to ultimately think for myself. One of my main teachers always said “you can figure it out on your own all you have to do is think about it osteopathically”. That was the flavor of the early American osteopaths at the start of the profession. That there were ways of doing things that were right out of the textbook but then there were ways of doing things in the clinic and those ways of doing things in the clinic needed to be discerned by the practitioner and only the practitioner. That was where I first saw the whole notion of applying principles. But quite frankly I wasn’t very effective in applying them. Certainly I had a busy practice but I didn’t feel as though I was very osteopathic in anything I was doing. I wasn’t really able to close the circle between a technique driven procedural osteopathy and the original writings of A. T. Still which I was very interested in. At that moment I remembered what Dr Reid Johnston had told me. His approach was a huge contrast to the procedural approach. He would say “you know osteopathy is not a bunch of manipulative techniques, it’s about the legion”. At that time all the osteopathy textbooks were changing and they were talking about somatic dysfunction not the lesion and there are reasons for that but it really left me in “no man’s land”. I remembered, Dr. Johnston said there was an old guy in England (which I thought was kind of funny because he himself was about 80 years old at the time). So in the mid 2000’s, as my own osteopathy school was getting off the ground, I ended up going to the UK and flew back and forth across the Atlantic ocean for two years, taking courses with John Wernham.