I often use the concept of an archaeological dig when I’m treating patients (regardless of their age).  When a new patient arrives at clinic for the first time, tells the story of what happened to them, what brought them to me and what the problem is then the digging begins.

More often than not there are a few things in a patients past medical history, in some cases there’s a huge list of stuff, all of which is relevant on some level. One of my jobs as an osteopath is to figure out what is the new stuff and how to untangle it from the old stuff.

Backed up with clues from what the patient has told me and what I feel under my fingers I get a sense of which tensions are fairly fresh and those that have been around a long, long time. I get an idea of which joints are a bit stiff because of recent strain or injury and which haven’t been moving for years. Tensions are layered on older tensions and new injuries are layered on old injuries.

Getting an idea of what came first and how one old injury may have influenced a newer problem is important.  For a start the newer stuff should be easier to resolve as it’s not so imbedded into the structure of the body and we can normally give an indication as to how soon we would expect to see a change in a condition with treatment.

Also, whilst we’re on our archaeological dig through the tension layers in the body we’ll often uncover stuff that has been sitting quietly in the background unnoticed.  It may be an old injury that was never fully resolved or part of a postural pattern that’s been around for a long time.  Whilst this silent problem may have been happily minding it’s own business for years there’s a chance that osteopathic treatment may disturb it.  It’s all very well going along to have one problem treated but it’s as well to be warned if the treatment seems to trigger another problem.  If the old problem was in some way related to the newer injury then, to avoid a recurrence, the older archaeology has to be accessed.

Let’s face it, most folk that come along to see an osteopathy for the first time do so because the problem hasn’t resolved by itself or it’s simply too painful or debilitating to cope with. There will more often than not be incidences in the past when a minor version of the same problem has occurred but ‘sorted itself out’, but this time it’s worse and not resolving. So inevitably every patient turns out to be an archaeological challenge for the osteopath.