Category: Research

Osteopathy requires reliable and valid research tools to generate evidence on the different aspects of practice including how practitioners approach the clinical care of patients. Such research will help the osteopathy profession understand its contribution to healthcare provision and communicate this to stakeholders. However, current quantitative tools to measure the different aspects of osteopathic practice […]

Observing how individuals actively adapt to their environment may provide additional insights into traditional clinical tests. Rather than using tests that only identify joint mobility limitations, it seems relevant to use clinical motion tests that assess global biomechanical functions more generally and identify functional behaviours. This study explores whether different functional kinematic behaviour patterns appear when […]

There is a lack of evidence to support a correspondence between osteopathic palpation and anatomical findings. The concept of dysfunction could be defined using more accurate words when describing palpatory findings if they could be explained by objective measurements. The forearm Interosseous Membrane (IOM) is a fascia often evaluated by osteopaths, searching for Fascial Dysfunction […]

Osteopaths are expected to keep up to date with research evidence relevant to their clinical practice and to integrate this knowledge with their own experience and their patients’ values and preferences. One of the potential challenges when engaging with research is to make sense of it, to decide if it is trustworthy, and if it […]

Computer use is a well-known source of chronic pain, leading to absenteeism and reduced productivity and well-being. This study evaluated the feasibility of conducting a full-scale randomised controlled trial. Several methodological variables defined trial feasibility … MORE

Osteopathy is regulated as an independent healthcare profession in Portugal. The Osteopathic Practitioners Estimates and RAtes (OPERA) project was developed as a survey to profile the osteopathic profession. This study aimed to describe the characteristics of Portuguese osteopathic practitioners … ABSTRACT

In the field of manual therapies there is a growing interest in moving from passive hands-on approaches to patient active approaches. In the osteopathic field there are both active and passive methods described as integrated in the process of care. However, this prospective linkage has not been formally explored and is not well shared in […]

Recognizing and aligning individuals’ unique adaptive beliefs or “priors” through cooperative communication is critical to establishing a therapeutic relationship and alliance. Using active inference, we present an empirical integrative account of the biobehavioral mechanisms that underwrite therapeutic relationships. A significant mode of establishing cooperative alliances—and potential synchrony relationships—is through ostensive cues generated by repetitive coupling […]

Osteopathy is a person-centred healthcare discipline that emphasizes the body’s structure-function interrelationship—and its self-regulatory mechanisms—to inform a whole-person approach to health and wellbeing. This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for developing an integrative hypothesis in osteopathy, which is based on the enactivist and active inference accounts. We propose that osteopathic care can be […]

Osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) is a patient-centred, whole-body intervention aimed at enhance the person’s self-regulation. OMT interventions are focused on somatic dysfunctions (SD) that can be defined as an altered regulative function associated with inflammatory signs palpable in the body framework in different body regions. The conceptual model that sustains SD, as well as its […]