What’s the Difference Between Osteopaths and Physiotherapists?
Certain medical conditions may make you wonder if you need an osteopath or a physiotherapist. In order to know, it helps to understand more about what these medical professionals can do for you.
Understanding Osteopathy
Osteopathy is a therapy that focuses on restoring wellbeing to the function and structure of your body. It targets musculoskeletal disorders with treatments that help rehabilitate and reinforce to prevent the same problems from occurring again and again.
Musculoskeletal disorders affect the muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones. Osteopaths target these areas with a whole-body approach. The goal is to restore damage and correct damage while retraining the body to heal itself.
An osteopath will use massage to help you relax your muscles and release tension. They will take joints along through their natural range of motion and stretch to open your stiff joints. The biggest benefits of osteopathy are getting pain relief, increasing mobility in your joints, relieving tension in muscles, and promoting blood and nerve supply to your tissues.
Understanding Physiotherapy
Physiotherapy can help people of any age restore their normal movement and range of function. It goes beyond the physical aspect of recovery, teaching those with illnesses, injuries, or disabilities how to better care for their own health and wellbeing.
The goal of using physiotherapy is to bring you to a state of recovery and can be used on a wide range of systems such as cardiovascular or neuromusculoskeletal. A physiotherapist will use manual therapy with hands-on treatments to massage and manipulate the body, effectively reducing pain and stiffness. This also restore your normal range of movement.
They also help you with movements and exercises that can benefit your whole health, improving your function and mobility, relieving pain, and getting you active again. They can use TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) treatments with mild electrical currents to provide pain relief too. The results are enhanced blood circulation, pain relief, better mobility, and improved function.
What Is the Difference Between Them?
While it might seem that osteopaths and physiotherapists are similar, they are different in some key ways. Osteopathy focuses n the body as a unit with the body systems being connected and involved in self-healing. The treatments are more holistic than physiotherapy.
Osteopaths will be best for those with issues involving musculoskeletal health while physiotherapists will have more varied issues to treat. A physiotherapist may be best if you have a soft tissue or peripheral joint injury.
Physiotherapists do some manual therapy like osteopaths, but they focus on rehab-style exercises and incorporate other treatments. If you need to see one of these medical professionals, the good news is you don’t have to go anywhere. With In Your Home Therapy, we can send osteopaths or physiotherapists to your home at your convenience to give you the treatment you need to feel your best!
