What is osteopathy?

To help you get familiar with our profession, we’d like to answer an important question: What is osteopathy? We would like to give you a brief introduction to its origin, essence, and methods of treatment.

Everything in the body moves: from muscles to blood vessels, from organs to bones. Adequate mobility of our body tissues is necessary for functioning vital and without complaints.

Osteopathy was established in the early 1900s by Andrew Taylor Still, an American physician.

Osteopathy is a manual form of medicine in which the mobility and function of various tissues in the body are examined. It is a treatment approach based on principles from anatomy, physiology, embryology, and neurology.

Osteopaths strive to ensure an optimal functioning of the body`s self-healing ability. 

For teaching purposes, osteopaths often make a distinction between the different types of tissues that can be treated: 

• Parietal tissues (mobility of muscles and joints)
• Visceral tissues (mobility of organs, around their own axes and in relation to other organs/tissues)
• Craniosacral tissues (mobility of the brain, brain membranes, dura, spinal cord, ...).

Below you can watch a video from the Dutch Association for Osteopathy (NVO) that shows what an osteopath actually does. The video explains some of the core principles on which osteopathy is based.