Nic Splanch

You know you're in trouble when a professions leaders do not have a good understanding of the their own profession. One hundred years ago in the USA osteopathy was a thriving healthcare discipline which offered an alternative to the orthodoxy of the time. Times have changed, here in the UK osteopathy has become and is now taught at undergraduate level as a one dimensional palliative treatment for musculoskeletal disorders. What was unique about the osteopathic concept of disease has become lost, diluted and misunderstood, so that treatment fails to do anything other than relieve aches and pains. This has happened for several reasons, but probably the biggest and most shocking is the osteopathic profession itself. After the death of John Martin Littlejohn in 1947 the principle education facility for teaching osteopathy in the UK changed the model of osteopathic teaching from the osteopathic concept to a medical model. This is not what osteopathy is or was, but is what osteopathy has become known as. The peers of the profession who have never understood or studied traditional osteopathy because they were told that it's outdated are unable to grasp an understing of this. By the time an osteopath has been working in osteopathy for 10-20 years they invested too much to be able to see what they are and have been doing is wrong and misguided, well intentioned as they may be, they cannot move away from the medical view of osteopathy because of the length of their investment. The regulators have no clue as to what osteopathy is, when they ask what it is they ask a peer who also knows little of what osteopathy is beyond his own nose. So then they try to protect the public with a framework for a high risk profession and totally over regulate it, strangling the life blood out of it and attempting repeatly to define a scope of practice. The trade organisation, helpful as they may appear to be when a member is in trouble, are led by an ex regulator man, who one wonders if he still works for the regulator or not. Therefore the trade organisation tends to run in parallel with the regulator rather than oppose it. They call it pragmatism. Even the history is not safe from being subtely rewritten to favour the new and inferior form of osteopathy. Little snipes here and there at the pioneers, criticism of literature nearly 100 years old but having nothing to offer to replace it but a lack of understanding. What will happen in the future?