Medway Osteopathic Clinic

07/07/2025

Intermittent fasting and weight reducing drugs both can have a role in losing weight. Type 2 diabetes complicates this. Get advice before dabbling:

Is intermittent fasting appropriate for patients with diabetes? Experts discuss medication adjustments, hypoglycemia risks, and which patients might benefit from this popular eating plan.

01/05/2025

17 ways to keep an older brain healthy
Researchers have identified 17 risk factors that contribute to the chance of developing stroke, dementia or depression later in life — conditions that can share an underlying mechanism of damage to small blood vessels in the brain. A review of dozens of studies identified several ways to reduce the risk, most of which will not surprise you: eat well, stay physically and mentally active, don’t smoke or drink too much and build healthy relationships. The biggest single thing you can do: keep your blood pressure under control. “If you’re starting to work on one of them, very often you’re actually improving multiple at the same time,” says physician-scientist Sanjula Singh, who co-authored the study. “Choose just a first risk factor and then take it step by step.”

10/04/2025

According to the results of a poll published today people in Kent and Medway have to wait the longest in England to see their doctors.
Family healthcare is not restricted to what is available within the NHS.
While private healthcare insurance can prove costly and not cover everything, especially long term conditions, classical osteopathy offers more than just pain relief for low backs.
People often ask if I can help with their knees or other musculoskeletal pain.
Yes, that's pretty basic work for any osteopath.
Classical osteopathy was always more like drug free general practice. The problem has always been with showing trial based evidence for its value.
Small trials like the 12 person, 12 week trial I carried out 35 years ago on the treatment of people with asthma really don't count as proof, good results notwithstanding.
The regulator of osteopathy is mainly made up with people from medicine rather than osteopathy and they are convinced we are useless if not a danger to the public and to my mind and that of many older practitioners end up doing that same public a disservice by preventing us talking about any possible value of osteopathy.
We are here providing private healthcare based on a non medical viewpoint.
Why not see if we can help?

26/03/2025

Accidents can happen.
If you get hit by a lorry we fix you up and say "avoid lorries" :D
Everyone else is hit by life.
Once you are fixed you go straight back to doing what hurt you in the first place (including the fridge if, like me, you work from home).
Think about what you are doing when you hurt yourself.
(This is also known as "blame the patient" when teaching students ):D

Unfortunately many people come in with a "last straw that broke the Camel's back" scenario.
The problem we face between us, patient and practitioner, is the last thing that brought the condition on is usually a problem only for much of what went before and this is often only revealed with a course of treatments.
Guess who is too lazy to ask people to come back in?
I believe people should take the decisions about their own health for themselves.
If you feel you need help come in.
if one treatment helps but doesn't last or fully sort the problem you are encouraged to come again.

22/03/2025

Sometimes I may be grumpy.
It happens, usually when someone insists on telling me their diagnosis.
This may have been from a friend, their GP, A and E, the internet, or just plain what they think is the problem.
I recognise I may not be the the last word in diagnosis, indeed I recall one GP saying that it didn't matter what I diagnosed, he was the doctor and his diagnosis was what counted. I responded that might be true if he was doing the work on the patient.

We do not , we cannot know what is happening in the human body, it is far too complex for a thorough knowledge at any time.
Diagnosis works with a series of models, a number of simple logical steps that ignore huge swathes of potentially modifying information that we either don't have or don't even know the existence of, that allow us to test and treat and measure the outcomes in the particular patient at that particular time.
All treatment is an experiment.
Science informs us but treatment is an art form.

19/03/2025

Charles Darwin was not the first to talk about an evolutionary process, just the first to provide evidence for it.
Organisms change.
Change underpins all life.
All the processes that keep our bodies alive, growing and adapting to our environments depend on change.
Every time you breathe your internal organs move about in response to compression and expansion, all the fluids of the body are drawn towards the chest area, affecting the amount of blood getting to the heart and thus to the force and volume that blood has leaving the heart to be oxygenated in the lungs or distributed as a changed fluid to the rest of the body.
Basic physiology yes, but essential to understanding osteopathy.

18/03/2025

Hooray the clinic floor has at last been repaired.
Now that there is less chance of losing a patient into the depths of the basement I think it's about time I started talking about the reasoning behind osteopathy.
Osteopathy is a philosophy of healthcare, a way of thinking about health that focuses on possible causes of the problems of the patients .
As such treatment is aimed at removing the cause rather than attempting to deal with the results.

I'll do a few posts to rough out the concepts I was taught soon.

21/02/2025

Growing Evidence on Diet
Diets that include fried and processed foods tend to be high in omega 6s, while those that include salmon and tuna are higher in omega 3s.

Research has shown that consuming more omega-3 fatty acids is associated with a lower risk for mortality from prostate cancer, explained study investigator William Aronson, MD, with David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Research suggests that ingesting more omega-6 accelerates the growth of human tumors in mice, while raising omega-3 levels lowers it. High omega-3 and low omega-6 are also known to have an inhibitory effect on M2-like macrophages, which are the predominant immune cell type in prostate cancer metastasis.

14/01/2025

The clinic has been open in City Way for over 36 years last month. I had worked from above a shop on the Davis Estate in Chatham for 4 years before that. She Who Must Be Obeyed says I can work until I'm at least 80 so I can still sort people out for more than another dozen years yet. 🤣🤣

04/01/2025

Freedom.
Osteopathy is the treatment of the fluids and forces of the body. Bones and muscles are just some of our most used tools.
All people live with gravity and the body has to cope with the constant load.
We have to breathe, eat, move, work and sleep in various ways and the body has to adapt to the loads put upon it.
Equally the stresses of emotion have to be coped with.
Healthy tissue has to be fed and drained by the fluids of the body and we try to ease that process as we free the joints that allow loads to be redirected, freely.

Unfortunately you have to pay me to free you up, it's not free.

12/12/2024

A patient asked me recently if I only treated backs.
I treat bodies.
It's always seemed strange that people who come for treatment, where I pull their whole body around, have the idea that only the back is my field.

I'll even nag you over your eating, drinking and smoking habits :D

07/11/2024

Latest dementia findings: "Our analysis found distinctly more significant association between alcohol consumption and dementia risk among women drinkers…[but] suggested that alcohol's impact on dementia results may be more evident in women, who typically had lower rates of other risk factors," the authors wrote. Nevertheless, "our findings suggested that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption for dementia."
- Medscape