“Cure is the prerogative of the organism.” These are the words of G. D. Hulett, Osteopath and nephew of Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of Osteopathy. Hulett lived, practiced, and taught in Kirksville, Missouri and wrote these words in 1904.
When I first read this quote in the late 1990s, I was both inspired and relieved. I didn’t have to be a miracle worker. I was never comfortable with the idea that any one person could be so powerful as to cause the cure or healing of another person. I was never drawn to the idea that someone else had the ability to change the course of my body's functioning, and I didn't want that power or responsibility over others. Upon reading this quote, I felt confident and reassured that my responsibility as an Osteopath and physician was to diagnose and treat my patients, and to educate them in order to create the conditions that their bodies needed to further their own healing process.
I don't mean to minimize what it takes to offer a good Osteopathic treatment. It takes years of dedication, training, study, and practice to hone one's perceptual and manual skills, and to learn to hold the space for others. It is an ongoing, lifelong endeavor to be a good Osteopath. But no matter how gifted the Osteopath is, the response to that treatment unfolds in the patient's body. Jim Jealous, DO used to say that the fulcrum of a treatment is in the patient, not in the Osteopath. To reword Hulett's quote, "healing only occurs when the patient responds to the treatment."
I encounter so many people these days who just want to go to a practitioner and have them “fix” or heal them. Many people want to lie down on the table and have someone make their bodily troubles disappear. It just doesn’t work that way. The best that someone else can do for us is to help create the conditions for our own body to do what it needs to do to remodel, adapt, or learn to compensate for what has changed due to age, illness, or injury.
I have devoted my life to the exploration of healing. I’ve had plenty of my own healing experiences to test my philosophy and approach personally, and then I practiced for 25 years as an Osteopath and had the opportunity to see how it all unfolded for other people.
My conclusion is absolutely clear; no one heals another. We can help each other find the conditions, causes, and situations that prevent our health from fully expressing itself, but then it’s our own body, our organismic being, that has to respond to the input.
I have been studying Osteopathy since 1981, and I am always searching for ways to deepen my understanding and educate people about how to duplicate and support the treatment experience. So many of the problems I encountered in my Osteopathic practice could have been easily remedied by my patients themselves if they could have re-learned to interweave their bodies’ natural tendency to breathe, move, and rest into their busy lives. Development of our kinesthetic sense—the sensation and awareness we have of our own movement—is the key to this process. In my experience, Continuum is the only approach I’ve found that elicits something powerfully healing and reverent that parallels Osteopathic treatment, and it empowers each participant to access the ability to heal themselves.
If you want to explore with me in person, please consider coming to my workshop, Embodiment Through The Senses, October 30 - Nov 4 at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in western Massachusetts. Here is a link: https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/embodiment-through-senses-transformative-self-care-retreat
If you would like to explore this and other Osteopathic concepts, please listen to the new podcast I'm doing with Steve. Here is a link to our homepage where you'll find all the details: https://osteopathyunplugged.com/
