This post is a commentary on the audio text “Our Hands” by Dr. James Jealous.
Biodynamics is about relationship. Our osteopathic oath says we should be a friend to our patients. We start that relationship by using our hands to listen. That’s actually a radical idea. These days medical schools – both MD and DO – have figured out they have to train students to listen to their patients during the interview process. They teach them to balance getting information with listening to the patient and sometimes forget that these two tasks are related… but that’s another conversation. In biodynamic osteopathy we listen to the patient when we talk to them, but we also listen with our hands.
In the first part of this audio file Dr. Jealous discusses the transition. He explains that we start osteopathic training by applying a force with our hands to an idea of normal and abnormal, learned from a book, and waiting to see how the tissues respond to the force we applied. If we make the transition he describes to functional then we allow one hand to listen to the motion response in the whole body and the function of thoracic respiration. The other hand continues to apply a force. This balance between and afferent and an efferent hand requires a kind of listening that requires we overcome some of our medical school training.
Finally over time we get to listening with both hands. Then we begin the biodynamic journey of building relationships. We build a relationship with the therapeutic forces, with the patient, with the whole. We start to better understand the relationships between parts and of parts to the whole. And interestingly we develop a relationship with our own hands, and ourselves which also grows, as our practice and skill grow over time.
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