Dr. Payam Hakimi Osteopathy and Cranial Osteopathy @bofyofharmony

Foreign. What is osteopathy? The function of skeleton is to hold our body together and protect it. The skeleton, with muscles and tendons, hold all of our structures intact. Our internal organs like our nervous system, our heart, our lungs, our GI system are all protected by the skeleton. But sometimes the skeleton shifts a little bit. The reasons for shift can be trauma, accidents, falls, or it can be day to day work. Some of us sit down the whole day, some of us have our head down the whole day, which creates neck and back issues for us. Osteopathy was originated in United States by Dr. Andrew Taylor Steele in the 1800s. And its philosophy was when the structure shifts, it will put pressure somewhere in the body, either in the cardiovascular system, the lymphatic system or the nervous system. And as that happens, the body starts changing. We'll get inflammation somewhere, we get pain somewhere else. We lose the function of something. We start having problem with certain movements with our shoulders or with our neck. But the main issue is pain and then loss of function, because as the bones don't properly move, the function of that area will go away. The function of osteopathy is to gently move the joints and the structures back where they need to be. Sometimes they're cracks, sometimes they're releases, sometimes they're stretching. But the whole concept is to change the flow of the lymphatic system, the cardiovascular system and the nervous system. I'll give you an example. When someone sleeps on one side every night, they start changing their head and their neck a little bit. Their neck gets tilted a little bit. So what happens is the vertebrae start shifting a little bit. As the vertebrae shifts, they put pressure on, on the nerves, on the lymphatic and the vessels, the blood vessels that go up and down the neck. So some of my patients come back and say, I get a lot of neck pain, I get jaw pain and headache, but it also feels like my arm falls asleep at times, or it's swollen at times. All of that is because the structures have moved. Something that we actually call thoracic outlet syndrome or carpal tunnel syndrome. These can be issues that can be treated with osteopathy properly. There's also something else which is part of osteopathy that's called cranial osteopathy. Cranial osteopathy is actually applying the same concepts to the cranium. We know all of these bones are separated from one another and they can shift. Like if someone gets traumatized, if they have a fall, if they get traumatized to the side of the jaw. Or simply by chewing on one side more than the other side. What happens is these bones start shifting and as they shift, they start creating pain in the specific places. The function of cranial osteopathy is releasing all of these bones so the bones can function better, they can move better. And as that happens, the whole physiology of the head changes. TMJ goes away, headaches go away, migraines get better. So osteopathy in essence is removing the misalignments of the body so that everything in the body can function better and with that, bringing back the physiology to the body so the cardiovascular system, lymphatic system and the nervous system feel better. A lot of our patients say they wish they would have known us earlier because they have aches and pains that no one has been able to take care of. I urge you to make an appointment to come in for osteopathic evaluation so we can align your body, we can align your cranium so that you can feel better.