What is osteopathic medicine?What is osteopathic medicine? Good question. Osteopathic medicine seeks to heal patients through manipulation. DO’s use their hands to manipulate the body in order to enhance the healing power of the body. The human body has the ability to heal itself over time, but OMT helps the body to heal more quickly. OMT is very useful for treating musculoskeletal disorders. For example, let’s say a patient comes in with shoulder pain. An allopathic doctor might prescribe pain killers and send their patients away. Osteopathic doctors can perform OMT on the shoulder in order to help the patient’s body to heal more quickly. OMT isn’t a fix-it-all, but it’s another tool that a doctor can have to diagnose and treat patients.
The Holistic Approach Osteopathic physicians are also taught to treat patients holistically, whereas allopathic physicians are traditionally taught to treat patients as individual diseases or specific body parts. For example, let’s say we have a patient with back problem. An allopathic physician might recommend seeing a specialist rather examination and prescribing pain killers. An osteopathic physician will investigate whether other parts of the body are affecting and causing the back. Treating holistically means looking at the body as one whole unit. This means that the body cannot be looked at as just single units or parts, but rather as one integrated unit that affects each other. So the osteopathic physician might find that the patient has one leg that is shorter than the other, which is causing the back pain. The best course of action is to treat the legs, which will help resolve the back problem.
Are DO schools easier than MD schools? Besides these two points, osteopathic physicians can do everything an allopathic physician can do, from prescribing medicine to performing surgery. Because osteopathic medicine is not widely known yet, it is a little easier to get into osteopathic medical schools than allopathic medical schools. However, that doesn’t mean the education is any easier. An osteopathic medical education is considered to be more difficult since students need to learn OMT. Over the past few years, the average MCAT and GPA have been rising for osteopathic medical schools, as well as allopathic medical schools. It might be in your best interest to further investigate if osteopathic medical schools are right for you. Return from Osteopathic Medicine to Previous Page
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