What is Osteopathy?

What is Osteopathy?

Osteopathy uses the studied physical manipulation of your body's muscle tissue and bones to help restore healthy functioning of injured areas. Osteopathy is based on four basic principles:

  • Each structure in the body supports the body’s functions. If a structure is damaged, out of place, or otherwise not working properly, the body will not function at its best.
  • The natural flow of the body’s fluids – lymphatic, vascular and neurological – must be preserved and maintained.
  • The human body is the sum of its parts. Its physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive systems don’t work independently -they work in harmony.
  • When the body has no restrictions, it has the inherent ability to heal itself.

At RiverLakes, an osteopathic approach is used to assess and treat your body as a whole, which allows us to identify if there are multiple factors contributing to your symptoms or other parts of the body that may be playing a role. We manually assess the restricted or constricted areas of the body and work on those that are not moving normally and (wholly or partially) causing the issues. There are direct (e.g. soft-tissue techniques) and indirect (e.g. facilitated positional release) techniques that may be employed by your therapist, as well as balancing, reflex, fluid, and other combined techniques.

Osteopathy has been helping Canadians for over a hundred years - in fact, the Dominion Institute of Osteopathy produced its "The Canadian Osteopath" pamphlet in 1900. Contact us to see if Osteopathy may be the right treatment for you.