I don't understand why an MD would want any association with the pseudoscience that osteopathy is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteopathy
Marketing I guess?
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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In the US, the AMA has always artificially limited the supply of MDs. Over the last century osteopathic medical schools basically adopted all the same philosophies of evidence based medicine as “regular” medical schools, maybe with a vestigial course or two on spinal alignment. Both have the same licensing requirements.
At this point, DOs in the US are basically just regular doctors with lower MCAT scores and undergraduate GPAs, and indeed, they basically fill the role of providing doctors to less lucrative specialties and regions.
The main bottleneck in training new doctors (both MD and DO) is that federal funding for medical residency slots have remained mostly unchanged since 1996. Some hospitals have been able to pay for extra slots out of their clinical revenues, but they'll be facing more financial pressures because of the Big Beautiful Bill.
Can't we just call it Trump's 2025 Budget Bill, instead of pretending it's a plus-sized porn star?
that's a mouthful
No clue why you're being upvotes when the very first paragraph of the source you cited contradicts you. DOs are great, and definitely not pseudoscience peddlers
It is distinct from osteopathic medicine, which is a branch of the medical profession in the United States.
That's not a contradiction, the fact that it is the page you get from searching the term is exactly their point.
Looking at the page Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, it even seems to point to both having the same origin (1874 USA) and later changing:
Osteopathic medicine (as defined and regulated in the United States) emerged historically from the quasi-medical practice of osteopathy, but has become a distinct and proper medical profession.
Be it resolved, that the American Osteopathic Association institute a policy, both officially in our publications and individually on a conversational basis, to use the terms osteopathic medicine in place of the word osteopathy and osteopathic physician and surgeon in place of osteopath; the words osteopathy and osteopath being reserved for historical, sentimental, and informal discussions only
Though also...
DO schools provide an additional 300–500 hours in the study of hands-on manual medicine and the body's musculoskeletal system, which is referred to as osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM). Osteopathic manipulation is a pseudoscience.
and from the related sources:
Mark Crislip also pointed out that DOs are using less and less osteopathic manipulation in their practice. This is a good thing, and hopefully it will eventually completely fade away. Essentially we need to distinguish between osteopathic medicine, which is mostly equivalent to standard medicine, and osteopathic manipulation, which is pure pseudoscience akin to straight chiropractic.
EDIT: Also it really sucks that things are muddied like this, I have a neck problem and there's a potential solution that uses a precision machine but I have no idea if it's a real procedure or just more quackery. I've asked a few times and got no responses or just downvotes. Though I also don't know if the chiro places near me have it or the needed x-ray capability.
As far as I can tell, there is nothing in chiropractic practice that is not quackery.
Think about it this way: the basic practice is the idea that you have misalignments causing problems, and that you can manually manipulate the body back into alignment. But then what keeps you from getting unaligned again as soon as you stand up? (Nothing, of course! That's why you have to keep going back!) Take, for example, the common inguinal hernia. You can manually manipulate it so that you're forcing the intestines back through the abdominal wall. And it absolutely relieves the immediate discomfort. But you're not actually fixing anything; you need surgery to stitch the tear up. If you have weak support structures causing a problem, then physical therapy is going to create a permanent solution. If you have a herniated disc that's not healing and causing referred pain, then you need to surgically fix the herniation.
If its a chiropractic thing then it's quackery. If not do you mind sharing the machine?
do you mind sharing the machine?
Atlas Orthogonal Percussion Instrument*. Basically it pushes the top vertebra back into alignment based on the precise angle needed.
For some background, the cause is I had whiplash many years ago. I also likely have EDS (a potential factor for the low-speed whiplash) so it's possible even if this machine has some basis it might not be a reliable fix for me.
* often called just the first 2 words
Yeah, that's some chiropractic bullshit. With EDS you have a much greater chance of a chiropractor fucking you up and its a neck issue, would be a hard fuck no. There's been repeated studies showing that chiropractor manipulation of the neck has a greater than acceptable chance of death, paralysis, stroke, and arterial dissections.
Order of operations
- PT and massage therapy
- A relevant specialist (you dont mention what issues you actually have) and this may lead to
- surgical intervention
Why do they keep a name referring to a pseudo-science then?
It is as if astrophysicists were using the name Doctor of Astrology and then claiming it is distinct from the astrology pseudoscience. It would be absurd, wouldn't it?
oce didn’t say they were pseudoscience peddlers, oce questioned why they still have a name unchanged so associated with pseudoscience
There is no contradiction. Their question is:
Why do they keep the term 'osteopathy' in the US, when the don't do osteopathy, but real, honest osteopathic medicine which would usually be denominated as orthopaedic?
I don't understand it as well, they're quacks here in Germany
E: typo
A lot of DOs go to Osteopathic medical schools because getting into MD schools is crazy competitive. It’s just another path to becoming a doctor that’s an option if you don’t get into a US MD school. The medicine curriculum is basically the same between the two. Though I’ve worked with a bunch of DOs who believe in osteopathy and practice it.
It's not even don't get in. They're rigorous institutions that have a marginal difference in competitiveness. They just make you take a class on those dumb manipulations. In the end it doesn't matter if you went through DO school or med school: if you're shit you're not getting matched into or getting through residency. And the key part is both sides of that pipeline compete for the same limited residency placements that are significantly fewer than the number of graduates and are judged the same.
Oh they’re definitely not judged the same. There’s a reason DOs interested in the more sought after specialties rarely try for MD programs. When you have a bunch of alpha nerds who base their self worth on test scores and other stuff like that, you get arbitrary stratification. And I’ve seen good doctors fail STEP tests and shit doctors who graduated from Harvard. There’s always those situations when some happen to be good at the stuff a system deems worthwhile but suck at being a person and vice versa.
So they're schools of medicine with just enough quackery sprinkled on top to receive a different name. And some of their alumni embrace the quackery while others reject it.
How would you know the DO you're about to see is a quack? You don't I guess. If you're risk averse, you'll just call them all quacks and find a doctor without the quackery pixie dust.
This might come as a shock, but that "MD" behind their name isn't a guarantee they dont hold quackish beliefs either.
Not a shock, to the point that I got to doing a little song and dance to suss it out when dealing with a new doctor. What the MD does is tell me that at least they didn't have to actively reject part if their curriculum to avoid quackery.
research has found no significant differences between the professions when it comes to hospital readmissions, death after hospitalizations, surgery outcomes or other patient metrics
While vestiges from Dr. Still’s original philosophy are still incorporated into modern training — students spend roughly 200 hours learning a hands-on approach for diagnosing and treating various ailments called osteopathic manipulative treatment — most D.O.s say they don’t use these techniques.
Following the link:
Of 10,000 surveyed osteopathic physicians, 1,683 (16.83%) responded. Of those respondents, 1,308 (77.74%) reported using OMT on less than 5% of their patients, while 958 (56.95%) did not use OMT on any of their patients. Impactful barriers to OMT use included lack of time, lack of reimbursement, lack of institutional/practice support, and lack of confidence/proficiency. Factors positively correlated with OMT use included female gender, being full owner of a practice, and practicing in an office-based setting.
I swear I read in the newsletter with the article I posted that this <5% was around the same percentage of MD patients who received osteopathy...