For most disorders, the treatment offered by an osteopathic physician is essentially the same as what you'd receive from an MD, including prescription medicines and surgery as needed. This form of therapy ranges from light pressure on the soft tissues to high-velocity thrusts on the joints. In its most typical form, it calls for little more than gentle manipulation of the joints and spine. To many people, manipulative treatment seems like a specialized type of massage. Others erroneously compare it with chiropractic adjustment, which focuses exclusively on realignment of joints.
Younger DOs tend to use it least of all.
However, there are no firm statistics to support this assertion. As in other forms of care, there is no set frequency for treatment by an osteopathic physician. If you are receiving manipulative treatment, however, you may require 3 to 6 sessions in all. To Accomplish Osteopathic medicine began as an outgrowth of conventional U.S. medicine in the late 1800's, a period when the causes of disease were still unknown and most treatment consisted of crude surgery or the use of drugs to control obvious symptoms. Disenchanted with the persistent failure of these techniques, Civil War physician Andrew Taylor Still devised a kinder, gentler approach based on his belief that all disease was related to disorders in the muscles and joints.