Introducing Osteopathy

Osteopathy and its benefits

Osteopathy works by encouraging the body’s natural process of healing. Osteopathy is a manual therapy. This means osteopaths use their hands to feel how your body works, treat you and also measure how you respond to treatment.

Alex Jones explains what will happen when you visit an osteopath, how long it will take and what an osteopath can do to help you – both physically and emotionally.

Osteopathy and Physical Recovery

Osteopaths consider the body has an innate ability to heal itself and no part of the body should be treated in isolation. Pain may be caused by the body compensating for reduced movement in another area, therefore different parts of your body may be treated, even thought they are located away from the site of pain. Because a common cause of pain and dysfunction is a poor blood supply or congestion in the body’s tissues, the techniques your osteopath will use are often also aimed at improving the blood supply to and the drainage away from painful areas.

Osteopathy and Emotional Recovery

When we have suffered loss our bodies react physically, reflecting our more personal grief. For osteopaths, it can be easy to spot when people are distressed purely by looking at how they hold themselves. Sometimes these physical postures and physiological reactions can be painful in themselves, as well as detrimental to our health more broadly. Osteopaths can help someone who is struggling with the loss of their baby to identify these protective compensations and help them to adapt physically through treatment, exercises and common sense advice.

Here, Kate Handy speaks plainly about how osteopathy works – both generally but also following pregnancy and childbirth, and how it might be particularly helpful for anyone who is experiencing deep grief.