Osteopathy on Animals – What is it Actually Doing?

Chris Bates  M.Ost  DipAO  EEBW  BHSAI

While more animal owners than ever are seeking Osteopaths for their beloved companions, many are not entirely sure what their practitioner is doing or how osteopathy works.

It would be impossible to explain fully what each intervention involves. The understanding of Osteopathy takes time to acquire and even longer to master. However, it is useful to be able to describe to an owner a basic overview of what is occurring and how the treatment will be of benefit.

Osteopathy is a unique approach to healthcare and therefore takes longer to comprehend. Osteopathic care does not seek to impose upon the animal, but rather to provide afferent information to the higher centers of the body in order for change to occur by the body itself. 

A Different Paradigm 

What causes illness? One could describe health as the state in which one has appropriate functioning of all systems required to sustain life and complete tasks needed to maintain that state. 

There are of course many things that could be considered “good health”  not needed to simply sustain life. These might include factors such as personal happiness or social connection, but while imperative as well, more on these later… 

Proper health relies on homeostasis. This is where the body maintains its internal environment conducive to health while being able to adapt to external influences and environment. An example of this is pH balance in the body. 

This regulation of acid/base balance is essential for biological functions to occur. If the internal environment becomes too acidic or too alkali then the physical structures of the body begin to denature and no longer function as intended. 

The body is always trying to survive, it never “goes wrong”. The body going wrong would assume that it is doing something against its own interests and contrary to its received information. 

All processes that happen in the body are a result of the input it has; it would be impossible for the body to act in a way that is not aligned with what it senses. So, if this is the case, why does the body do things like pain, fracture, colic, dizziness? They are bad right?

What is bad and good are not always aligned with what is right and wrong or perhaps more accurately “correct and incorrect”. Let’s take a fever for example. A fever is uncomfortable, unpleasant and what you might consider as “bad”, but it is actually very healthy and correct.

The fever is the body raising the temperature of the internal environment so as to assist in the destruction and clearing of the infection present. The higher temperature can create a less desirable environment for the foreign bacteria or virus replication and also activates immune cascades and enzyme activity required to kill and clear infection. 

In conventional medicine, the patient may take drugs to suppress the fever to make them feel more comfortable. Suppression of the fever however will only prolong the time, energy and resources needed to recover. 

This in turn can have longer lasting effects such as reducing the ability of the immune system to act quickly when presented with the same or similar infectious agents again. (1) Osteopathically it would be more suitable to allow the fever to run its course and remove any barrier to it taking place well. 

Conclusion: Osteopathic advice for a patient with a fever could simply be to make them as comfortable as possible such as cooling cloths or soft bedding and providing the body with the necessary input to do a fever well such as water, electrolytes and safe space to rest. 

Removing Barriers

The essence of Osteopathic thinking is to remove the barriers and blockages to allow the body to function. This could be as obvious as clearing backed up fluid in the lymphatics or more subtle such as finding the problem in the negative feedback loop of thyroid function. 

Barriers often occur due to external trauma. This requires a clear understanding of the trauma and how it occurred in order to deduce why the body has made the adjustments it has. 

The OAB (Osteopathic Articular Balancing) taught at LCAO is a classical Osteopathic approach that provides the neurological higher centers with feedback. When we use a rhythmical and repetitive oscillation of the joints, the body receives proprioceptive and nociceptive feedback without any active involvement from motor activity (or at least reduced activity). 

This offers a mirror of sorts for the higher center to decide if the current ‘behavior’ is still appropriate or if it is using energy and vital resources unnecessarily. 

A pattern of altered function could occur from a minor strain. If a horse refuses a jump and stops at the fence, they can quite easily strain their neck in their attempt to avoid collision and regain their balance. 

If this neck strain caused a compression of the transverse foramina (route of the spinal nerve root) on one side of the neck let’s say at C5 to C7, then this would compress the roots of the musculocutaneous nerve. 

The Biceps brachii muscle is innervated by this nerve; if the signals (afferent and efferent) are being disturbed by root compression then the biceps may not function adequately. One might see a weakness in forelimb protraction or difficulty with hills or jumping as this muscle plays an important role in elbow flexion and limb protraction. 

The strain in the neck may have long since recovered but the altered signals to the forelimb have then created a facilitation at the spinal center forming a positive feedback loop sustaining the weakness and altered function.

To remove the “barrier” to health in this case, the Osteopath can interrupt this feedback loop thereby allowing the neural center at that spinal level to process that the bicep isn’t injured. This can be done by articulating the spinal levels into gapping the foramina and decompressing the nerve roots. We know that nerves can be altered by compression, torsion, stretch and altered environment.  

What is Actually Happening in Animal Osteopathy?

When I am treating, owners will often ask what is happening under my hands and will want to know what I’m feeling. This is understandable as not only is the animal very important to them but they are investing their money in us and animals are expensive even when healthy. 

As described above, it wouldn’t make sense to try and discuss exact pathophysiology and action of intervention but it serves well to have a way of describing things in a way digestible by anyone.

Here is a taster for you. Plus, this could be handy for those of you already studying who want a way of talking to your patient’s owners. 

Let us assume that we are performing OAB to the hind limb of an amateur showjumping horse and we detect through our repeated rotations and oscillations that there is a hard, taught end feel on stifle joint extension. Through our thorough understanding of joint range of motion, we know that the stifle is not reaching full passive range. (that’s some of the good stuff in our courses).

 We combine this finding with the fact that on palpation, the hamstrings on that same side were rigid, observation showed those hamstrings to be somewhat less developed and on active movement, there was less limb protraction and tracking up that side too. The history described a tendency to put in stops at some jumps. 

When a horse stops suddenly at the last pace of approach to a jump, they will sit their weight back onto the hind quarters and the hamstrings suddenly take much more weight than normal. At the same time the hind legs can slip forward creating an eccentric contraction in the hamstrings. It is very easy to strain muscle that is in eccentric contraction, especially when that occurs quickly. 

A case like this may not appear lame and therefore a Vet may suggest Osteopathy. The paces are however affected and the effects of the chronic pattern of asymmetry could lead to other dysfunctions and difficulties. 

We would explain to the owner that despite not showing lameness, there is an altered movement pattern that seems to be related to a previous hamstring strain that has led to a tightening of that side. We of course know this would be called a hypertonicity but sometimes owners are not interested in all the science jargon. 

We can use OAB to approach the pathological barrier (hypertonic end feel) using repetitive gentle and rhythmical movement. This sends information back to the spinal levels where the nerve roots for the hamstrings arise. 

We can explain to owners that not all information going to the central nervous system needs to go to the brain for processing. Some information is processed at the spinal cord and these are called spinal higher centers. 

Although we might not go into the exact detail of the muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs, we can describe how there are structures located within the muscle tissues and tendons that detect stretch and load. 

We can then talk about how the act of moving the limb passively (without the horse activating muscle) can gradually take the tissues beyond that dysfunctional tone, those neural structures in the muscle and tendon tissues then relay this new (more functional) position to the higher centers. 

As there is no (or less) pain perception and no further damage being detected, the higher centers relay signals back to the tissues to accommodate the new position and reduce tone. We can describe how this takes good palpation from the practitioner to feel the slightest changes and not push beyond the barrier staying in the rhythm of the tissue recoil found. 

The barrier we removed with Osteopathy here was the continuous feedback loop from muscle tissue to spinal center and back again. Of course, we may have found that the spinal center had dysfunction by some altered vertebral positioning. 

In that case we could interrupt the feedback loop by adjusting that instead, thereby allowing the processing center to actually get the correct information and put out the correct signals to the peripheral tissues. 

This is just one way Osteopathy “treats”. 

The Non-physical Stuff - Effect of Animal Osteopathy?

Do you remember earlier I mentioned things like happiness and social connection? Well that indeed fits into the Osteopathic paradigm of health. At LCAO we teach about animal behavior and psychology and often discuss these subjects in our blogs. 

The Osteopathic Paradigm looks at the whole animal inclusive of mind and body. To be truly healthy, psychological and social needs must be met. While it could be argued to be somewhat physicality bias, even Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs describes how the social and psychological aspects of one’s nature are essential considerations in living well. 

As things stand within the practice of Animal Osteopathy, it can be tricky to navigate some of these areas as our scope of practice is not as defined as some practitioners. General advice and recommendations based on evidence and critical thinking are of course within the realm of the Osteopath. A dog who is suffering stress from isolation and separation anxiety while the owners are out working could develop stereotypical behaviors such as furniture chewing, pacing or even self-harm. 

The Osteopath may be called to the dog who is showing musculoskeletal signs of strain but the barrier to health here could be the repetitive strain of the isolation behaviors. Removing that barrier to health could be as simple as suggesting an owner work from home when possible or organize doggy daycare. 

While we can still manually treat patterns of strain, the maintaining factors being behavioral and psychological are addressed from the advice given. Even referral counts as Osteopathic treatment. 

The job of the Osteopath could be to refer on to a practitioner who has more scope in the area of behavior. Forming a link with trainers, behavior consultants and other experts in that field is a great boon to any animal therapy business. 

This article really only scratches the surface of Animal Osteopathy and its practice. The best Osteopaths are perpetual students who know that the learning is never over. To learn about the interconnectedness of the animal’s being and how Osteopathy can help them, get in touch with LCAO to find out about our range of courses. 

To learn more about a career in animal osteopathy, click here 

Resources

1. Sylwia Wrotek, Edmund K LeGrand, Artur Dzialuk, and Joe Alcock; 2020; Evol Med Public Health. 2021; 9(1): 26–3; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7717216/

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