BRIDGING THE GAP IN HEALTH CARE 1

As a student of Osteopathy I encountered many difficulties. Shortly after entering the course I realised the potential inherent in the Osteopathic philosophy and I felt it offered a true starting point into wholistic healing and patient care. I knew it offered a holistic approach to patient care but most of the way through the course I struggled to see the big picture, to piece it all together, to truly see and understand the meaning behind the basic principles I was taught.

In my efforts to learn all the techniques and to become proficient at my work I found I, like many others, got caught up in too much detail and couldn’t really find, nor understand what the real problem was. In third year I realised I had jumped ahead of myself and couldn’t really feel what was going on with basic palpation. I forced myself at that time to go back to my first year principles and practise simple lumbar flexion in order to actually feel which areas were in trouble (at a basic level first).

By fourth year I still could not see the big picture. All I kept finding were many problems, with no idea how they were all related. More to the point, I found that I could not even agree with myself as to a diagnosis. I would keep getting a different diagnosis depending upon the method I chose to find the dysfunction. What was right?, what was not? What was the best and surest method? I found that everywhere I turned I could not get any satisfactory answers. It was something I needed to experience and work out for myself, it seemed. All of the different lecturers and clinicians I asked all seemed to give a different answer to the same question. They all had their own ideas on the problem, apparently finding no agreement amongst themselves, which only threw me further into confusion. They couldn’t all be right, either could they all be wrong. Some seemed very good at mechanics and explaining the specifics (in theory or practice) but couldn’t see the big picture themselves. Some could see the big picture but had difficulty expressing it in simple terms which I could understand. Those that saw the big picture it seemed didn’t worry so much with the fine detail—Why? How do we cross the two extremes? How can we see both the big picture and understand the specifics and be able to explain it in terms everyone can understand? How can we piece together the puzzle to find agreement on all the apparent contradictions? Furthermore, as students we were often told that we were perhaps not feeling the right thing. Again different practitioners would give different feedbacks. If asked why? Few could give a satisfactory answer. The practitioners would often get a different diagnosis from us and at that stage I felt that they must be right and I wrong as I was only a student. Later I realised that we could have both been right, it was just that we were looking at it from a different perspective, or feeling a slightly different tissue or layer, thus giving a different diagnosis (we needed a method of testing this possibility—which I will discuss later).