How Osteopathy can help
Osteopathy is a gentle and effective hands-on approach to healthcare, based on the principle that the way your body moves influences how it functions. Tension in one system can affect how another part functions. Equally, relieving tensions and strains in one system can have far reaching beneficial effects across all body systems.
Osteopaths have a comprehensive understanding of how the body operates and work on a deep level with the various inter connected systems: anatomical, physiological and neurological.
“Osteopathy is a philosophy,
a science and an art”
Carter Harrison Downing
Osteopaths primarily work through the Neuro-Musculo-Skeletal system, mostly on muscles and joints, using a wide range of gentle, non-invasive manual techniques such as deep-tissue massage, joint articulation and manipulation, and connective tissue unwinding.
The treatment is a gentle and subtle but profound way to help return your body to its naturally healthy state. All treatment focuses on improving local blood supply (fluid nutrition) to the tissues and normalising neural input to the area to encourage the body to heal and repair. The mantra of Andrew Taylor Still, Osteopathy’s founder, was ‘The Rule of the artery is supreme’
What is Cranial Osteopathy?
Cranial Osteopathy is the name given to a subtle and refined approach to osteopathy developed by a pupil of Andrew Taylor Still; William Garner Sutherland. His observation that the bones of the skull must be formed around movement led him to explore the effect of movement restriction on the body’s health and function. The name simply refers to the fact that it includes the structures inside the head, but the technique is used throughout the body – not just in the head.
Cranial osteopaths use a highly developed sense of touch to feel subtle changes of tension and tissue quality in the living anatomy of the whole body. They spend many hours during their four year training developing their palpatory skills, learning to listen with their fingertips and to diagnose areas of strain or dysfunction.
“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”
William Sutherland – Founder of Cranial Osteopathy
Cranial treatment can seem to the patient to be a quiet listening process. The Osteopath is listening to the tissues and sensing subtle differences in quality such as thickening, stiffening congestion and stillness. These qualities create different fulcrums to the body’s natural healthy tissue motion.
Acknowledging and supporting this as we listen can allow the connective tissues to unwind into healthier balance. Like the unwinding of a telephone cord, or tangled headphone cable. This can help your body align and sit more comfortably within itself. Releasing tension and stress within the body.
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