Many times patients do not ask what osteopathy is and what the differences are with physiotherapy, from Somsalut we will try to clarify this term a little.

In osteopathy, we can define it as the science and art of diagnosing and treating the mobility dysfunctions of the tissues of the human body, which cause disorders and disrupt the body’s state of health.

To be able to put ourselves in the situation we will explain its origins. This was born from the hand of Andrew Taylor Still, an American doctor in the second half of the 19th century. He takes very simple foundations, which the medicine of the time did not take into account. The first school of osteopathy dates from 1892 in the United States, it arrived in Europe in 1917 in England and in 1936 in France, arriving in Spain later.

As we said earlier, osteopathy seeks to treat mobility restrictions and promote tissue balance, in the cranial, structural, and even visceral areas. We can consider it a way of life where we seek to improve the body holistically from a physiological and anatomical basis, trying to integrate all the symptoms and signs of the patient to find and solve the origin of the problem, called osteopathic dysfunction.

That is why the osteopath has many assessment techniques along with treatment techniques such as:

• High-speed techniques (the crack)
  Inhibition techniques
  Joint mobilization techniques
  Techniques for working on organs, blood vessels, or glands.

The main difference is that the physiotherapist will use in the treatment of thephysical exercise and external tools such as ultrasound, electrotherapy, manual therapy such as stretching, traction; instead, theosteopath uses a more global view of the patient, being his manual therapy is the only working tool.

On the other hand, the frequency of treatment is different, physiotherapy may require less spaced sessions, while osteopathy seeks to space them out a little more to allow the body’s self-regulation principle to act.