Day 3

Eeek I am so behind! But I must update! To review things... :)

A lot of today was anatomy stuff. We had two lectures on it between the morning and afternoon, followed by lab where we used a bone saw to perform a laminectomy and remove some of the lumbar spinous processes. It took kind of forever, and I didn't even do it because I didn't have goggles or glasses (and yes, I guess I was too lazy to go find a pair and put them on too). But it was very cool to see the spinal cord and the cauda equina (horse hair) nerves, and everything else down there. We also exposed more of the upper back region, cutting deep to get to the suboccipital triangle.

Other lectures today included "The Osteopathic Principles" and "Introduction to Osteopathic Diagnosis: Anatomical Landmarks, Surface Anatomy."

With things like osteopathic diagnosis, we get an incredible amount of practice palpating/touching and we are taught to relate to patients early (as you saw from my previous entries, from day 1).

There are also four osteopathic principles which define osteopathic physicians from allopathic physicians in how we think:

1) The body is completely united; the person is a fully integrated being of body, mind, and spirit.
This is the “Triune of Man” – Dr. A.T. Still. An example would be if you injure your toe, that force has propagated through your entire body- the whole body felt it. Or how dogs coming into a hospital help lower your blood pressure-> the relaxed mind helps the body. Think of it as a triangle with health in the middle, and if one part is off, so is your health.

2) The body is capable of self-regulation, self-healing, and health maintenance.
This is the search for health over disease.Wolff’s law says if you apply force to a bone, more bone will grow where those forces are placed. As you use your body, it remodels itself. Our goal is to optimize healing potential if there is something wrong, or if healing is needed.

3) Structure and function are reciprocally interrelated.
This is where the OMM stuff really starts coming in. Structural and functional systems all work together integrally and if the structure isn't right, the function will have problems also.

4) Rational treatment is based upon an understanding of the basic principles of body unity, self-regulation, and the interrelationship of structure and function.
In other words, the doctor has to come up with the treatment plan for the patient and the therapy is based on taking the other three principles into consideration. It’s an integrative/holistic approach.


In short (from our lecture slides), "With the significant exception of OMM, it is not so much our modalities of medical practice that sets Osteopathy apart...It is the clinically applied Osteopathic Philosophy in which we strive to find and facilitate our patient’s health, in the face of the overwhelming contemporary medical focus on disease."

And in that vein, we were told, "You are all infectious agents and we’re going to inoculate the world with you.”

:)