Allopathic Osteopathic Allopathic Approaches in Medicine Dominate

Allopathic Osteopathic

Allopathic approaches in medicine dominate how healthcare is administered in the United States in today's society. Osteopathy has made some gains in popularity over the decades but it is well established that the majority of today's doctors practice and employ an allopathic approach towards healing their patients. The purpose of this essay is to explore the possible differences in society if allopathic medicine did not develop as the dominant profession but was bifurcated into equal proportions of MDs and DOs.

Salzberg (2010) suggested that medical doctors and DO's are not the same thing and a certain deficiency of training is present in doctors of osteopathy. He wrote " are they equal? Well, not quite. Osteopathy started out as little more than pseudoscience, based on the mistaken idea that manipulations of the skeleton and muscles -- massage, basically -- would cure disease. It was invented by Andrew Still in 1874, who made this and many other claims, none of them supported by science." This bias suggests that something within the allopathic community needs protection, as such dogmatic thinking distorts reality by falsely equivocating osteopaths with quackery.

There appears to be not enough room in medical practices for alternative views of healing and a society with more DOs would require a large scale opening of the mind by society which could accept some new approaches to old problems that just can't quite disappear. Allopathic approaches appear to be failing at a massive level with incredible rates of chronic disease such as cancer and diabetes growing every year. It appears difficult to accept that a more holistic approach that focuses on prevention as opposed to treatment would possibly alleviate these disastrous trends.

Peters et al. (1999) understood that many of these diverging alignments begin in medical school. He wrote " medical education in osteopathic and allopathic schools is different in major ways: mission, curricular emphasis, type of faculty, research orientation, and type of student. Not only is the mission of all osteopathic schools to produce primary care physicians, but the dominant academic department is family medicine. " If this is true, a society with more DOs would perhaps be prevalent with more family practices which would be a distinct change from the clinic/hospital/ER-based practices that supports most of the healing methods.

An attractive benefit of osteopathy is that it typically poses little risk of producing negative interactions with other medications and treatments. This makes make it an excellent supplemental treatment, which doctors, physical therapists and other medical practitioners often prescribe in addition to more mainstream, primary treatments, such as surgeries and painkillers or other drugs. This would suggest that less of these types of accidents would appear in a medical world with more DOs.