Killing the beast…I have started to talk about empathy and synaesthesia here and here, and that is definitely the direction we are heading toward. But I am not fully done with explaining how I finally got rid of my old and tired osteopathic model that pretends that I can change mature connective tissue (fascia for exemple) or muscles with my hands.

At that time, I was already seeing patients. And I was applying what I had been told to apply. It was simple really. A patient comes, he had a pain in the lower back, and I had to find what was forcing tissues to be tensed up. Because obviously, tension equals pain, right? Well no, but that took me a long time to understand that.

Deep down, I could feel that something was wrong. I could not change my patient’s tissues, no matter how strong I was pulling. I could not understand why a patient was getting better and another one was not. So I started to do my little experiments and to question my beloved teachers.

For 10 days, I was treating everybody the same way, using what we call a protocol, which is the opposite of osteopathy supposedly (but many osteopaths do that, treating patients like muppets, people just don’t know it). Then I was using a different protocol. Results were the same. Ouch. Could my technique be less important than what I have been told?

Models and protocols

I remember meeting a colleague of mine. For 40 years, he has been doing the same thing to patients. Using the same words. According to him, everything starts with a twisted pelvis, a specific rib and a neck vertebra. During my career, I remember meeting many osteopaths like that. None of them agree about what is the reason why a patient suffers. But they all have their own protocol and they all deeply believe that they know the truth about the human body.

In most cases, when you do not get results for a patient, you are told that you do not have the good technique, or that your treatment is not “powerful” enough and that you need to keep on working. Blame is on you. No one, during my studies, ever mentioned the idea that maybe the model is flawed. So I had to check it by myself.

The end of the old world

And that is why I decided to undergo training for a modality called “Niromathe”.

A big change. Within 4 days, everything I thought I knew collapsed just like a hous of cards. Just gone, at least the skeleton of my knwoledge, the model itself.

Here is what I learnt (and most osteopaths are told the same):
– Treatments last 45 min
– Patients lie down
– Patients remove their clothes
– I have to move joints, stretch muscles

After 4 days, here’s what I was doing:
– Treatments last 10 to 30 minutes (Actually 10 minutes, but I still like to talk with people)
– Patients can be treated standing up, or sitting down.
– Patients do not need to show me their underwears (Still, it seems to be important for some of them)
– I can work with the skin and get results

In Niromathe, everything happens at the level of the skin. One hand pulls the skin in a direction, while the other hand executes a specific movement on some specific points.

Guess what? Results are the same. Some patients like it, some do not as it does not look like what they have in mind when it comes to osteopathy. But results are the same.

Boom.

Killing the beast

Well of course, Niromathe uses a protocol and has a model that talks a lot about Chinese medicine etc (at least when I trained in 2012), but that definitely forced me to question my knowledge. And note that Diane Jacobs talks about Dermoneuromodulation which is a much better model to explain the action of Niromathe in my opinion.

At that point, I knew that…I knew nothing. Ouch. Killing the beast took me time, but it was now done.

Spoiler alert: I do not know much more now, I just became more comfortable with the fact that I know very little. And I stopped using models to explain what is happening. Meditation helped me to do that and that’s why I now teach meditation online in order to make people more independent.