In one of my very first osteopathic classes, one of the instructors said ‘don’t limit your patient’s ability to heal based on your own preconceived notions of what’s possible. I have seen miracles happen.’ And I thought to myself, ‘THIS! This is where I am meant to be.’
I believe that one of the differences between osteopathy and allopathic medicine is that we are always looking for the ‘health’ of the patient. Sure, there might be illness, injury or dysfunction present, but that person is not their illness, injury or dysfunction. That person is a mostly healthy individual who has been limited to and defined by their dis-ease. And that's not saying that allopathic medicine is wrong. We need both. Allopathic medicine knows how to keep us alive. It is an amazing profession and their knowledge and dedication to healing the broken and the sick is incredible and complex. But 'healing' is also not the same as 'healthy'. And sometimes it can confuse 'healed' with 'healthy' and there can be a giant gap between those two states.
Given my propensity for all things 'woo woo' and what I now know about the Law of Attraction and how the Universe works, how can a person ever be expected to recover to a full healthy state if the ONLY thing we’re focusing on is their illness or what's wrong with them? What about ALL of the things that are still going right? Why do we ignore that in favour of the one thing that’s wrong?
Well, because that thing is oftentimes painful, lets be honest. And in no way am I saying that we should ignore that. Pain and dysfunction are the only things our bodies have at their disposal to communicate with us. That’s totally valid. It just shouldn’t be what we focus on.
Osteopathy is about amplifying the health of the patient while removing the barriers for that health to function properly. It believes in the inherent intelligence of the human body to self regulate. It believes in us to find our way back when we no longer believe in ourselves.
Any profession that puts its faith in the patient’s ability to auto-regulate is something special, if you ask me. Coming from a purely physiological perspective, this philosophy was refreshing to me in a way that was mind-blowing at the time. I had long been exposed to a branch of science and medicine that had become so focused on the disease state that it could no longer see all of the things that were still functioning properly. And it certainly had no clue how to boost those things. My own journey back from injury had so thoroughly disillusioned me and my faith in the healthcare system’s knowledge of what ‘health’ even was that I had pretty much resigned myself to a life of constant pain.
And then Osteopathy found me.
And it nursed me back to health because it, as a profession, believed in my ability to get there.
It’s why I believe in each and every one of you. I believe in your ability to self-regulate. I believe that, given the right circumstances, anything and everything is possible.
I believe in miracles. Because I witness them each and every single day.
What’s your health miracle?