What is osteopathy?
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” – Albert Einstein.
Recently, I got invited to my 6 year old son’s class to give a little talk about what I do at work. Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop: “Who is your daddy and what does he do?”. You got the picture?
So, what is osteopathy and what am I doing that makes me different from, say, a chiropractor? I hear this question at least once a week, but usually once a day. My patients ask me , my friends and family wonder what I do at work. But how do I explain it to a bunch of six year olds? And they can be very curious, those cute little beasties.
As a part of my osteopathic training I conducted an extensive research in order to gain understanding of what osteopathy is and what osteopaths do at their practices. Hence, I decided to dedicate a series of posts to this topic and show what I discovered.
So here is how I would explain osteopathy to a six year old… A practitioner of osteopathy is like a superhero. And like any superhero osteopaths have superpowers. Osteopaths can see with their hands and they can see and move things inside people’s bodies. Osteopaths use these powers to help people.
Osteopathic practitioners are also dancers, they dance with peoples skeletons, they waltz with organs, they flow with blood and they vibrate with nervous system. And of course, the colourful balloons are involved in this dance. After all, how can you dance without balloons?
So when someone comes to see an osteopath, the practitioner would ask the patient to show their boo-boo. And then the dance begins, after which everybody feels happy, energies and super duper healthy.
Do you think my little dance with the skeleton at my kid’s class was a success. I definitely hope so.