Medway Osteopathic Clinic

25/12/2025

Merry Christmas

16/12/2025

Blame the patient! It's their body, they have hurt themselves by their actions or they know about the cause.
The most important question when I work is "WHY?".
Why has the body got itself into this state?
My job is to give the patient a chance to heal but that takes two of us.
Why does the problem keep coming back?
Have you changed your lifestyle since your last treatment?
If not then that's probably why.
Exercise is not all it's cracked up to be, though as we get older the value increases, but if you are sick you can't take it.
For example, if you have a cold a sweaty workout may help you shrug it off by increasing your body temperature.
If you have flu you will not be able to do anything like a workout, just moving around is exhausting.

09/12/2025

and then, after you have twisted yourself with unexpected exercise, come in and get fixed.
You MOT your car after all, but you can't trade in your body every 3 years :D

09/12/2025

Exercise is important in our more leisurely worktype.
It has always amused me that the patients I have who work in industries that require high manual lifting levels spend their free time in the gym.
C'mon deskworkers get with the program :)

2-set-2-workout training is the fast track to gains without wasting time or energy

08/12/2025

We are a private clinic, not NHS.
Patients ring when they want treatment and I book them in accordingly.
The only wait time is when the available slots that day determine or when the patient wants to come later.

You pay.

If I think you need the services of anyone else I will tell you. After that it's your responsibility.
Your GP is the gatekeeper to the NHS facilities. To get anything done in the NHS it's via your GP. This can be seen as a bit of a bottleneck but the system works when the delays allow people to heal without input. It doesn't work when you need work done quickly - that's where AandE comes in and that's why they are all so crammed.
Short bouts of osteopathy are available through the NHS but this involves the system filter and delay. It is free at point of service and they will keep copious notes.
I have never had the desire to work in the NHS - my wife was a nurse for 40 years, enough to persuade me to never want any boss but her :D

05/12/2025

I find it bizarre (i.e. I don't know how it works) that sometimes I log onto the clinic site and see what has been posted, usually by me talking osteopathy and clinic changes for my patients only find a host of other stuff.
Tonight's message was to be about patients missing their appointments due to life and traffic.

The message I want to get across is "ring and tell me and I'm happy" :)

05/12/2025

How and why does a child or adult learn?
The why is simple enough: to cope with the changing world they will encounter.
How? Exercise mind and body.
To use a body well it does best when it is tuned.
Patients doing sport regularly come for treatment to get themselves tuned before competing.
There is no such thing as "Growing Pains" - just untuned bodies.
Come and get tuned up.

05/12/2025

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" said George Orwell in Animal Farm.

All osteopaths are created equal according to our professional regulator.
The protected title "osteopath" exists "to protect the public" so that people can't pretend to be qualified to treat you without breaking the law established in the 1993 Osteopaths Act.

"Experience without theory is blind, theory without experience mere intellectual play" according to Kant.
Experience should teach as long as you have theories to test , thoughts to mull over and successes and failures to learn from.

"Continuing professional development" (CPD or continuing medical development CME if you are a medic) is a mantra that has been encouraged :) for all professions and all fields of work supporting the idea that learning is a lifelong process and that mere qualification is just entry level standard.

Research suggests most people think themselves above average in whatever they put effort into. Mathematically half of people are below average, by definition :D we all have our bad days.

The underlying message in CPD is that what you think you know now is wrong but if you work at it you will get better :)

I started pre reading for my classical osteopathic education in1982 stared treating patients in 1984 and must be a slow learner because I'm still coming across patients and the written word that make me think.
This is why I go to work, it's fun :)

04/12/2025

We cannot claim to cure anything.
Not that claiming cure is banned or somehow naughty, it's just wrong.
And it's not just osteopaths.
Nobody cures anyone.
If a person gets better it's down to them.

The "seed and soil" model of infection is a lovely example:
Think of the body as the soil in which disease can grow when the seeds of disease are sown.
Deny the seeds what they need to thrive, make the body hostile and no disease should arise.
Bacteria, fungi, viruses, poisons, all can do damage.
Experiments on rats showed that when cancer cells were injected into the fluid surrounding their organs cancer only took root where fluid didn't move about.
Antibiotics reduce the load on the body by reducing the number of infectious bacteria but the body's own immune system deals with what it can. Strong immunity makes infection an uphill struggle for bacteria.

04/12/2025

There are many ways of looking at the world. The same events look different depending on your viewpoint. There can be more than one right, or correct way of interpreting what we see because the world is COMPLEX. Not just complicated, complex -if nothing else it's in a constant state of change. The saying used to be "you can never cross the same river twice, it has moved on".
Yes, we all know this and we know the world is not the same today as it was yesterday, as it's not the same for me as it is for you.
Everybody gets things wrong, everybody.
It's not just incompetence or laziness, everyone is learning about themselves and the world around them all the time. The world and you are everchanging - you have to to be able to adapt to what comes along.
This stimulus to change is what we call stress. Some people seem capable of adapting to everything, others seem so fragile the slightest thing seems to damage them.
Therapists of all types, physical, chemical, emotional "healers" are taught and learn ways of approaching the problems of their patients and apply their methods accordingly.
We are always in ignorance of the true state of the patient - it's too complex, stressed in so many ways by the time we get to see them and always changing.
Even when broken down structure underpins illness such as with cancer the person is still changing.
What levers the therapist can apply depends on the patient and the practitioner, it's an interaction.
People heal themselves, we just help.

28/11/2025

I'm taking the day off Christmas and Boxing day, also January 1st.
Otherwise just ring and make an appointment 01634 814700
(Who knew I'd be grumpy when people rang the doorbell for an appointment during lunch? :D )

25/11/2025

"Osteopathy treats the whole person" is a daft statement I used to hear when I was a student.
Everything affects the whole person.
The body heals itself if it has access to the right resources in adequate time and doesn't get in its own way.
Most of my work has been freeing bodies to help their rapid repair.
The role of a joint is to redirect load. If a joint isn't doing its job other tissues take the strain. Take the strain off and they can repair and recover.
Patients come in saying they think their problem is stress. Stress can be thought of a totality - a whole host of stressors adding up to stress the organism.
A stressor is a stimulus to change (if your head hurts when you bash it against the wall, stop!) so if you can reduce the total number of different things giving stress the body is more able to cope with what is left.

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