Traditional Chinese Medicine and Osteopathy

I frequently get asked "What is a D.O.?" or "How is a D.O. different than an M.D.?" The short answer is that there isn't much difference. Statistically speaking, most DO physicians don't regularly perform musculoskeletal manipulations (OMT) and basically practice medicine like an M.D. physician would practice medicine. Philosophically speaking, there is a difference and there are some osteopathic physicians who truly use these differences to influence how they practice. I've been taught that the body is an entity and that everything that goes on within the body is interrelated, so that dysfunction or disease in location A can and will affect location B (including psychiatric dysfunction/disease). This is done through impairment in vascular and lymphatic flow as well as through dysfunctions in the musculoskeletal system. Because of these beliefs, we are taught how to do OMT or various musculoskeletal adjustments to improve lymphatic and vascular flow and place the muscles and bones back into a neutral and more natural location. Yes, this is similar to chiropractors, and yes, there are differences but explaining those differences is beyond the scope of this post (actually the guy who founded chiropractors learned from A.T. Still, the guy who founded osteopathy).

It is my understanding that M.D. physicians learn to focus more directly on a disease entity and not so much on how it relates and affects other parts of the body. Of course all of this is generalized. I'm not saying that MD docs don't care about a persons feelings, and like I said most DO docs practice like MD docs, a generalized western approach. But the root of our education is different and I mention these differences because the osteopathic philosophy is undeniably similar to the Chinese philosophy of treating the whole body and individual and not focusing so much on the specific entity causing the problem.

An excerpt from the book The Web That Has No Weaver talks about why in recent years there have been increasing numbers of patients trying more Eastern styles of medicine:

• ...many people have begun to see that too often biomedicine is simply not concerned with general well-being because it can only assess very small, discrete bits of information...Our medicine parallels our society. New cures often produce side effects of unexpected virulence. More over, our central medical institution, the hospital, is structured like nothing so much as a health factory - a contradiction in terms. And probably most important, people feel that there is no place for their feelings, intentions, beliefs, and values in the biomedical perspective. Biomedicine often leaves the "person" in the waiting room.

The effectiveness of modern, Western medicine is being questioned within its own medical circles. An excerpt from the Journal of the American Medical Association mentions the:

• ...limitations of a linear, reductionist approach in our attempt to describe natural phenomena...There is an acute awareness of the havoc that the modernist worship of science has wrought upon Western popular consciousness...Science can tell us nothing about an individual. Science speaks in terms of probabilities, of means and standard deviations, the behavior of groups of people, not of individuals.

I bring all of this up because TCM attacks symptoms and complaints at the level of the individual, not the specific disease. Osteopathy, at its roots, has a very similar approach. And while many of these TCM therapeutic modalities don't test well in our scientific studies, there seems to be some question as to how effective these studies are at developing optimal treatments in medicine.

With all of this being said, even though I am an osteopathic physician, I am still trained in the West. I believe in the scientific method and for the most part will continue to practice evidence-based, western medicine. However, the next time someone doesn't respond to a treatment the way people in the studies responded, I will try my best to think out of the box and integrate the whole person and their circumstances in order to provide them with better care.

This concludes my posts on Traditional Chinese medicine. I hope people found them to be interesting if nothing else. Seeing this completely different approach to medicine was an eye opener for me for sure.