Considering nutrition and dietary supplements as an essential part of osteopathic practice helps to improve the vitality of our entire system.
“Working with an Osteopath to Become Aware of Nutrition”
Good nutrition resonates in the quality of each patient’s overall body tissue, and is something that can easily be discerned by the healing hands of the osteopath. A body’s health and metabolism are directly impacted by the nutritional elements put into the body. There is a profound connection between what we ingest and the quality of our body’s functioning. Improper nutrition can lead directly to fatigue, weight gain, and even the poisoning of our tissues. Not to overstate its importance, but nutrition is the key to quality health. As a result, for proper and complete therapeutic analysis to be performed, an osteopath needs to study a patient’s nutrition.
Early in my career as an osteopath, it quickly occurred to me that nutrition and dietary 
supplements were an essential part of an osteopathic practice. At the time, the 1980s, this was a rather innovative concept, but is now recognized to be of vital importance for anyone wishing to be healthy and wanting to prevent an avalanche of possible physical ailments.
What makes nutrition so important is that we live in an age where we are constantly being bombarded with chemicals. In the air we breath, the water we drink, the food we eat, the plastics that contain and cover our food, the revolutionary products protecting us against fire, the materials that insulate our houses and cars, the pesticides and fertilizers on our lawns, we are constantly surrounded and impacted by chemicals. More shocking to note is that cosmetic and personal hygiene products, without exception, all contain toxins dangerous to our health.
These toxins end up accumulating in our bodies, something each of us needs to understand to be able to improve our personal health and wellbeing. The more one is exposed to a wide variety of toxins, even in small doses, the more our bodies accumulate these poisons. At the same time, the more chemicals we absorb, the less our metabolism can adapt to and eliminate them, negatively impacting our bodies’ vital functions; including the brain, skin, arteries, muscles, liver, kidneys, and more.
While in many cases we cannot avoid the toxicity of everyday life, we can however determine the nature and quality of the food products we put into our system. These food products can also be significant in helping us cleanse our bodies of the chemicals that surround us. Which can be of rather significant to certain individuals, who based on their genetics, are apt to absorb and store more toxins than others.
All of which makes it of paramount importance for the osteopath to monitor and manage the diet of a patient, especially when he or she suffers from chronic pain, inflammatory and degenerative pathologies, and/or suffers from fatigue. Proper nutrition is a tool that opens the door to robust health, and helps the osteopath implement meaningful positive medium- and long-term treatments.
When patients sustainably and intelligently modify their diet following the advice of their osteopath, the long-lasting positive results on pain, stiffness, organ function, and overall health and mobility of the body, can be dramatic. More important, proper nutrition can also help the body fight off disease and the onset of any potentially serious ailment.
Vitamin, mineral and plant extract supplements are another important aspect to proper nutrition. They help the body deal with deficiencies that have been shown to exist in modern factory farmed and processed food, and to help support the function of tired or malfunctioning organs.
It may be shocking to realize, but many of the nutrients that should be found in vegetables, fruits and grains are often absent, or reduced in quantity and quality, or have been so transformed by the industrial food process that our body simply cannot absorb them. Industrial scale food processing, and the mono-culture crops grown on factory farms, all work to denature our food, mutate them into empty calories, and reduce whatever potential nutrition they might have once offered.
For example, the use of “Round-Up” chemical herbicide used in intensive agriculture – designed to kill pests by making their stomachs explode — remain on the plant after harvesting, end up being ingested by us, and transforms our intestinal mucosa and villi and prevents them from absorbing certain nutrients contributing to us becoming progressively intolerant to gluten.
This altered reality is the same with the farm animals and farmed fish. For example, an ounce of wild bison or deer is much less fatty, and packed with more protein, than any commercial animal. The same is true for wild and farmed salmon and other fish.The sad reality in which we live is that modern, factory farming methods and food processing has radically changed the food we eat.
This is a change that our bodies simply cannot adapt to, because it does not have the proper metabolic or physiological tools.To combat this, it is highly recommended that each of us eat organic, bio-diverse food that has not been processed, and combine this with high quality supplements precisely dosed to complement the needs of our bodies’ tissues and organs so that they can function properly.
Proper nutrition and dietary supplements can have a positive impact on our overall health and well-being, and when combined with osteopathic corrections can dramatically improve the vitality of our entire system.