UK-trained osteopaths like to think of themselves as fully-qualified front-line "healing professionals", but how can that be since their education is clearly sub-professional? Their training is often shorter than that required of plumbers. Five years of part-time study in some schools (while the student is working elsewhere full-time!) or three years "full time". "Cranial Osteopathy" specialists get all of twenty days extra training conducted on weekends.
Examination of Osteopathic school curricula reveals that their medical/scientific training is "conversational" in nature — inferior to that required of university-trained Registered Nurses. ie UK-trained osteopaths can talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk. For this reason, no (Western?) government trusts UK-trained osteopaths with sharp objects.
Osteopaths cannot prescribe effective medications. In fact, there's nothing much they can do, except swivel arms, palpate skulls, knead livers — though, in their defence, it must be said that osteopaths can perhaps provide a good massage. Any genuine general advice for healthy living that osteopaths provide is better dispensed by an RN Health Visitor or Registered Dietitian who is not likely to steer patients to a homeopath. So what is it specifically that UK-trained osteopaths do??? What justifies their white coat?
Perhaps the problem is the low quality of the students accepted into osteopathic training. Schools of Osteopathy in the UK have far lower entrance standards than do Medical Schools in the UK. Generally one good A Level is enough for matriculation to a UK School of Osteopathy, whereas even three excellent A-levels do not guarantee admission to a UK School of Medicine. Medical School and post-graduate Physician qualification requires many years of difficult full-time training. Osteopathic training can be done part-time...
One notorious UK-trained osteopath who visits this forum admits he had no A-levels at all when he applied to Osteopathy School. He left school at the age of sixteen. (He claims he later took some night classes to reach the low entrance requirement of an Osteopathy course). For him, the vocational choices he had in life were either Osteopathy or a career in Fish & Chips.
Examination of Osteopathic school curricula reveals that their medical/scientific training is "conversational" in nature — inferior to that required of university-trained Registered Nurses. ie UK-trained osteopaths can talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk. For this reason, no (Western?) government trusts UK-trained osteopaths with sharp objects.
Osteopaths cannot prescribe effective medications. In fact, there's nothing much they can do, except swivel arms, palpate skulls, knead livers — though, in their defence, it must be said that osteopaths can perhaps provide a good massage. Any genuine general advice for healthy living that osteopaths provide is better dispensed by an RN Health Visitor or Registered Dietitian who is not likely to steer patients to a homeopath. So what is it specifically that UK-trained osteopaths do??? What justifies their white coat?
Perhaps the problem is the low quality of the students accepted into osteopathic training. Schools of Osteopathy in the UK have far lower entrance standards than do Medical Schools in the UK. Generally one good A Level is enough for matriculation to a UK School of Osteopathy, whereas even three excellent A-levels do not guarantee admission to a UK School of Medicine. Medical School and post-graduate Physician qualification requires many years of difficult full-time training. Osteopathic training can be done part-time...
One notorious UK-trained osteopath who visits this forum admits he had no A-levels at all when he applied to Osteopathy School. He left school at the age of sixteen. (He claims he later took some night classes to reach the low entrance requirement of an Osteopathy course). For him, the vocational choices he had in life were either Osteopathy or a career in Fish & Chips.