what’s the difference between chiropractic and osteopathy (and which is more medically valid)?
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Osteopathy is generally the idea of trying to heal the whole person or body instead of just treating disease. Osteopaths become DOs and are board certified as doctors that regularly work in hospital settings besides MDs.
Chiropractors are not doctors, though they’ll try to act like primary care. They perform spinal adjustments, joint and spine cracking, with the idea that it should help the nervous system properly align to relieve pain. There is little actual scientific evidence this actually helps besides maybe for some lower back pain.
Neither one has any medical validity.
Chiropractic was literally just made up one day by a con artist trying to come up with a new scam, and osteopathy is an “alternative medicine” with the same validity as reading tea leaves.
Osteopathy helps blood flow, Chiropractic nerve flow. Osteopathy adapted to medical regulation so is more accepted, Chiropractic didn’t.
It depends where you are. Both are different forms of quackery, the difference is more about how much the practioners actually believe in it
In the USA, Doctors of osteopathic (DOs) are closer to a historic anomaly. Osteophathy itself is essential pseudoscientific spiritualism, but their schools are essentially regular medical schools with a small side course in bullshit.
Almost everyone going to DO school knows it is bullshit and they’re just tolerating it to get the medical education, because after DO school
Why do people put up with it? Because after you do residency there is essentially no difference between a DO and an MD, a heart surgeon who did their DO first before their residency training is the same as a heart surgeon who did their MD before residency training. There *is* a stigma because DO schools are easier to get into, therefore people can usually safely assume your undergraduate grades or MCAT scores were weaker than your peers, but by the time you’re a 40-something practicing physician no one cares
Why are there still DO schools if everyone, including the teachers, understand that the little side course is bullshit? I don’t know, historical momentum? I do know that their numbers have been dropping as more DO schools have dropped the BS and become MD schools
Outside the USA it’s a different story, osteopaths don’t have a medical degree, they *only* peddle the pseudoscientific spiritualism stuff. Almost the opposite of a DO in that aspect
For Chiropractors – it’s a mixed bag. Most traditional chiropracty is pseudoscience and sometimes potentially dangerous. The stuff that actually works they have adopted from physiotherapy sciences.
Many “soft touch” chiropractors are essentially physiotherapists that want to be called a doctor and charge more, while traditional chiropractors operate under a similar level of pseudoscience as osteopaths
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