What is Osteopathy?

Author: R. Paul Lee, DO, FAAO, FCA
February 21, 2024

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Osteopathy’s identity crisis has been going on from its very beginnings, but at this moment in time, we need a public discourse, a frank discussion, because the original concepts from the founder are being lost, buried beneath what he abhorred, conventional medicine. Speaking at a graduation ceremony, Dr. A. T. Still said, “If you go out thinking that Osteopathy is a good aid to medicine, you are using the words of incompetency.” (Still, in Schnucker, ed. Early Osteopathy in the Words of A. T. Still. Kirksville, Mo: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 172, 1991)

Today, Dr. Still is misapprehended by teachers in colleges of osteopathic medicine, because of many decades of avoidance of his primary message. I clearly remember the shock I experienced when I had time to absorb Dr. Still’s meaning as I turned the pages and read his words from his Autobiography during my residency in OMM at Kirksville in 1985. This experience shaped my career and became the impetus for a book.

I never learned these concepts from Dr. Still’s Autobiography in school: “Sickness is an effect caused by the stoppage of some supply of fluid or quality of life” (p.252); “It is our fortune at this time to raise our heads above the muddy waters far enough to have a glimpse of the law that we choose to call Divine law. That law we use in healing” (p.226); “God or nature is the only doctor whom man should respect. Man should study and use the drugs compounded in his own body” (pp.88-89); “…the Great Architect has put into their proper places within man all of the processes of life;” “…the eternal truths of Deity permeate his whole makeup…”; “The wisdom of Nature’s architect is found in every drop of your blood” (p.330).

The autobiography of the founder should be one of the main sources of information that any teacher of that particular discipline transmits through the lectures and laboratories bearing the name of that profession. The lack of such transmission is an unfortunate transgression of an unspoken contract that the purveyor of information must abide by to be a genuine representative of that profession’s philosophy and teaching. One cannot pick and choose what one represents to the upcoming shining faces of hope to cure the world. One must be true to the meaning of the essential philosophy propounded by its originator.

Teachers who dismiss the main message from the founder are apparently questioning his validity, credibility, and authority and seeing themselves as superior. They had to be thinking, “Osteopathy can’t be that esoteric; let’s make it practical, reasonable, and provable”; and “We can’t let spirit into the equation; that’s not scientific.” I wonder if they realize or admit that they are essentially discounting the man and his great discovery, worthy of a Nobel Prize (The Journal of Osteopathy, 1905, December). Read about how Dr. Still was excluded by conventional medical judges of the Nobel committee from getting what his great majority of votes should have assured.

The profundity of Dr. Still’s thinking is further revealed in The Philosophy and Mechanical Principles of Osteopathy, which became generally available for the first time in 1986. Within its pages is a section about biogen – tissue that manifests the life force. This section about the life force understandably lies outside the mindset of scientific education as do the previous quotations from his Autobiography. Biogen is a concept that requires its advocates to champion vitalism, that which is in direct opposition to science, the functional religion of conventional medicine. Vitalism and mechanism are contradictory terms to most people who hold to a Newtonian world view. They believe that using a well-healed mechanism produces a discipline that cannot be refuted, whereas, vitalism immediately calls into question the author of such notions. Why else are homeopathy and acupuncture not readily accepted by science? Oh my! Osteopathy could befall the same consequence. Let’s grab onto something that assures us of great security – science! Voila! Osteopathic Medicine!

Conventional medicine chooses science as its foundation to also avoid the embarrassment it experienced because of the unregulated snake oil salesmen that roamed the countryside with their nostrums and fantastic claims; because of the wooden teeth many (including Dr. Still and George Washington) had to wear due to poisonous calomel, a mercury compound given as a panacea by many doctors in the era of heroic medicine; because of the unfortunate deaths of famous individuals, such as George Washington, at the hands of his acclaimed physician who bled him to the point from which even this strapping man could not recover; because of the very common and vicious puking and purging from doctors’ prescriptions; and because of the rampant addictions from these same physicians doling out heroin and whisky as perceived cures.

Today, conventional medicine believes that science puts in order the cause and remedy of disease, that science can find the answers to unanswered questions about illness, and that science is our insurance against unregulated behavior from the doctors of previous centuries. However, science does not have all the answers. What about unexplained recoveries from significant illnesses? What about the placebo effect? The benefits of compassion in therapy? The mechanisms of healing through osteopathic treatment? The role of intention, attention, and love? Does the life force determine health as Dr. Sutherland declared?

What is Life? was the fundamental question that Dr Still asked:

“Let me say right here I feel as a hungry child seeking the milk of its mother’s breast. I am hungry mentally, absolutely hungry beyond description to obtain a more thorough acquaintance with the substance or principle known as human life. This hunger has been with me many years. I have nothing so precious that I would not give to have it satisfied. I want an undebatable knowledge, a better acquaintance with life and whether it be a substance or a principle that contains the many attributes of mind, such as wisdom, memory, the power of reason, and an unlimited number of other attributes. This short statement is to honestly acquaint you with my object in devoting all of my time, far beyond a quarter of a century, to the study of man, his form, and all his wisely adjusted parts, both mental and physical. I have explored for a better knowledge upon this important subject. My daily prayer has been ‘Give me that knowledge that will light up the human body in whom we find a union of life with matter and the combined attributes of this union.’ I have listened to the theologian. He theorizes and stops. I have listened to the materialist. He philosophies and fails. I have beheld the phenomena given through the spiritualist medium. His exhibits have been solace and comfort to my soul, believing that he gives much if not conclusive proof, that the constructor who did build man’s body still exists in a form of higher and finer substances, after leaving the body, than before” (Still, in Booth, History of Osteopathy, pp.18-19, 1905).

This quotation confirms that Dr. Still attended seances and witnessed discarnate beings, which was ‘comfort to his soul,’ demonstrating to him that life exists beyond the grave. The above quotation also reveals that his struggle with this question about ‘what is life’ was at the foundation of his exploration that culminated in his discovery of osteopathy. Dr. Still’s nephew G.D. Hulett, DO, PhD, who taught osteopathic principles at the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville while Dr Still was active there, and wrote a Text Book of the Principles of Osteopathy, 1903, p.12, stated very clearly that “…a theory of life is at the basis of the osteopathic science.” Hulett also said that function creates and maintains structure. Therefore, if we are to effect a structural cure, we must engage the function that created it.

Writing before Dr. Still was someone whom he read, Emmanuel Swedenborg, who penned in 1769: a spiritual influx “clothes itself with that which is natural, as a man clothes himself with a garment” and “…the very form of the body is the result of its essential [spiritual] determination, the body itself represents the soul, as it were, in an image” (Swedenborg, Intercourse of the Soul and Body, 1882, p.64). Rupert Sheldrake (A New Science of Life, 1981) described the morphogenetic field that pre-exists and generates the physical form. And Robert Fulford, DO agreed with Alfred Pischinger, PhD (Matrix and Matrix Regulation, 1991, p.78), that the etheric body creates the extracellular matrix which determines the shape and workings of the physical body. These are examples of functions that precede structures.

Humans have functions that do not belong to the physical world, but the physical world is all that science can measure. Science does not have answers for what life is, or the power of love. If Dr. Still’s philosophy is correct, love and life lie at the foundation of existence and need to be a part of the healing process. Dr. Fulford taught that the intention of love is essential for an optimal osteopathic treatment. We need to teach that, to teach about biogen, and to teach that spirit is the motive power of the organism. We need to learn and to teach how we address, during treatment, this profound aspect of the human – mind and spirit. This is the hopeful future of osteopathy. If we are being true to the source, Dr. Still, we would not only need to reach for something solid like science to anchor our beliefs as osteopathic medicine does, but also, we could simply accept that unknowable spirit is at the basis of it all, as osteopathy promises.