Opinion : Osteopathic Medicine

Submitted as a position paper for my Med. and Society ethics class:

Osteopathic medicine presents an alternative to the standard (allopathic) medical practice. Its in tenets include a holistic musculoskeletal focus and a type of healing called osteopathic manipulation (OM). It is not quite on the level with allopathic medicine, however and has some serious problems that would keep me from ever pursuing it as a career.

First, modern osteopathic medicine is little more than allopathic medicine with the simple addition of the OM techniques. When the practice was established in the 1800's, the move away from laboratories to hands on healing may have made a lot of sense by offering patients more tangible results. This is simply not the case with modern medicine however, as the advent of antibiotics, chemical therapies, genetics, imaging, etc. have proved that scientific techniques provide much more effective healing. To stay relevant, the osteopathic practice adapted by adopting theses techniques. This raises the question, what is the point of having an "alternative" set of physicians if they are doing the same thing?

This question gets to the real problem with current osteopathic medicine. Its education system exists mainly as a way to help less qualified students get into a medical school. In both personal experience and in the assessment offered by Dr. Howell, many of the students who apply to and enroll in DO schools do so because they were unable to gain admission to allopathic schools, not because they believe in a holistic approach to medicine. The Osteopathic schools also continue to reinforce this by admitting weaker candidates and letting their students take allopathic residencies after 3 years. Dr. Howell sites the AOA's own studies that most of its members do not use their specialized OM skill. While the holistic approach may have merit as a treatment option when used by a skilled practitioner and OM may have therapeutic value, Osteopathic medicine will not be respectable until it ceases to be a backdoor entrance for less qualified people to become physicians.