MANUAL THERAPY OR (AND) OSTEOPATHY

There was conducted historical and theoretical review of manipulative medicine, in particular osteopathy and manual therapy. It was stressed that officially osteopathy as a medical discipline took shape in the early nineteenth century, i.e. before the manual therapy, and a direct predecessor of manual therapy, chiropractics - in the late nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century there was defined a new kind of manipulative medicine, which has absorbed the positive from osteopathy and chiropractics. It turned out that the techniques of osteopathy and manual therapy have a lot in common, andthe techniques of osteopathy are physiologically less dangerous than energetic and sometimes dangerous techniques of manual therapy. However, the basic ideological stance of osteopathy - “osteopathic dysfunction” restricts the creative thinking of the obvious practical advantages of osteopathy in comparison with manual therapy. Manual therapy defined its theoretical base as the concept of barrier functions of locomotor system, which is a significant contribution to the understanding of the mechanisms of pathological conditions development and in their elimination. This seeming contradiction unfortunately prevents fruitful cooperation of these types of medical activities. Contrasting them with the aim of identifying the superiority of one of them is dialectically and gnosiologically meaningless, as meaningless, for example, is a comparison of the usefulness of right and left hands. Persistent sensitivity, a key requirement for the specialist of manual therapy is no less relevant in osteopathy.

manual therapy, osteopathy, craniovertebral osteopathy, functional barrier, myofascaial pain, afferent interaction