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June 28, 2010
Presidential Update
Dear Academy Members:
The American Academy of Osteopathy Board of Trustees and Board of Governors and the administrative leadership in Indianapolis wish you a happy and pleasant summer. It has been my pleasure to serve you as President since convocation in March. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to speak on behalf of the AAO in many occasions, including the Texas Osteopathic Association’s House of Delegates, Oklahoma Osteopathic Association’s state convention, the Florida Academy of Osteopathy, and as your representative to the Council of Osteopathic Post-doctoral Training (COPT) and the AOA Bureau of Osteopathic Education (BOE).
In addition, the AOA has called upon me to be the representative at the most recent RUC (Relative Value Update Committee) of the AMA. It was my pleasure to meet many D.O.s that are active in the practice of osteopathic manipulative medicine in Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida during these meetings. It is encouraging to me personally to be an encouragement to them as they carry on the high calling of being an osteopathic physician and surgeon. Many of them have concerns regarding the healthcare medical industrial complex and the insurance regulatory industry. I share their concerns. The American Academy of Osteopathy in conjunction with the AOA is working to ensure that we are adequately represented and accurately portrayed to insurance companies and the federal government agencies.
To that end, the AOA called upon me to give testimony before the RUC in Chicago this spring regarding the codes for OMT. RUC determined that the AOA should re-survey the entire profession regarding the use of OMT, since it needed to be updated. The AOA Board of Trustees’ Boyd Buser is leading this effort with the assistance of your Academy. My testimony at RUC was well received and helped the AOA further the goal of adequate and accurate representation for D.O.s practicing osteopathic manipulative medicine.
This spring, I provided testimony to the COPT opposing the plan for COPT to eliminate one of the seven core competencies. The first core competency deals with the requirement that all osteopathic residents demonstrate competency in OPP and OMT. The COPT committee has been working for a few years trying to integrate the OPP and OMT into the other six core competencies. The AAO position is that we are not opposed to integration, but we are opposed to diminution of OPP and OMT and future amalgamation. To that end, I argued that we should keep all seven core competencies maintaining OPP and OMT as an important and separate core competency. At the COPT meeting all but one of the council members voted for six core competencies with integration. It was then taken to the Bureau of Osteopathic Education. There, I testified again, stating that under combined residency programs, a separate core competency regarding OPP and OMT is easy to administrate for the program director and maintains the unique osteopathic identity to the residency program. That argument won the day and the Bureau of Osteopathic Education recommended to the AOA Board of Trustees that D.O. residencies should have seven core competencies with integration of OPP and OMT into the program. Thus, your Academy was successful in defending the OPP and OMT portion of all osteopathic residencies, maintaining OPP and OMT in all osteopathic residencies within the profession. It now goes to the AOA Board of Trustees this July.
In a few weeks, we’ll be headed to Chicago to attend the AOA House of Delegates where there are several House resolutions that we are watching. One, regarding the use of the terms “osteopathy” and “osteopathic manipulation”, the other has to do with research funding for OMT and OMM and AOA’s core competency program that we discussed above. The Board of Trustees will be meeting prior to the AOA House of Delegates to go over the annual budget and programs for the coming year.
2010 marks the “Year of the Osteopathic Spirit” and that spirit continues to be enlivened, enriched, and reinforced across the country. We have seen this displayed very nicely at the Florida Academy of Osteopathy and in the annual Cranial Academy meeting. At the Cranial Academy meeting Dr. R. Paul Lee’s program was titled “Matter and Spirit, the Study of Fluid, Fascia, and Function”. It was interesting to see the synergy happening across the profession regarding 2010 being the year in which we emphasize the spirit of osteopathy as it affects both the practitioner and the patient.
Previously, I talked about the core osteopathic principles that we all ascribe to; that being body unity, structure, and function are reciprocally interrelated. The body possesses homeostatic mechanisms and rational therapy is based upon the use and knowledge of the previous three principles. The osteopathic physician and surgeon also approaches the patient looking not for naming diseases but by identifying health and promoting health. This is the opposite of the allopathic training where the identification of the evil influences that are affecting the poor, suffering victim from the outside has to be identified and obliterated with a pill, potion, or scalpel. This allopathic approach to identifying disease and focusing on death and destruction is the opposite of the osteopathic approach to the patient cure. The osteopathic approach to the patient is embodied in the culture of life, not death. It is not emphasizing the culture of death. It is not emphasizing the name of the disease. It is not emphasizing and identifying the limitations of the physiology of the body, but identifying the possibilities and the existence of physiological mechanisms towards health that can be rallied, improved, and supported with good osteopathic procedures and healthcare delivery.
You, as a D.O. practice in this culture of life, this culture that identifies the needs and the existence of life within your patients’ body, mind, and spirit are the person who supports life. You are the physician that identifies the possibilities for health in forcing and reinforcing the homeostatic, structural, functional, and integrative and relationships that build up the body, one that is unified and whole. By giving that patient hope, by showing love in action, you are the one where grace acts upon nature. It is in your hands that you get to feel this life force, it is in your hands that you get to touch the patient and transform that patient into a more perfect, physiological whole.
This “year of the osteopathic spirit” is the incorporeal consciousness of us as osteopaths. The consciousness of a person is constantly molded and redeveloped by what one values and what one appreciates, what one thinks about, and what one envisions and idealizes their life to be. If one fills their mind, eyes, ears, and heart with scenes of disease, death, and destruction, one becomes more the purveyor to death. If one fills one’s life with demonstrable actions of life, one becomes more in union with life. This sense of one’s collective identity in viewing our attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities are considered to be characteristic of us, the AAO. Our incorporeal consciousness is based upon a culture of life, body unity, structure function, interrelatedness, and looking for health as opposed to disease. Furthermore, we use rational therapy, not therapy based upon mere faith or supposition, but one that is based upon facts and reason.
It was interesting to find from the scientific literature at the Cranial Academy meeting, microscopic realities that have identified the physiological and structural changes associated with osteopathic manipulative medicine, specifically the subtle, indirect forms of OMT provided by cranial osteopaths. These electromagnetic changes and physiological changes that have been identified verify the truth of what Drs. Will Sutherland and A.T. Still have described as palpatory experiences, now revealed in scientific literature throughout the world. I suggest you contact the Cranial Academy for CDs and DVDs of this latest program that identifies the histological and physiological changes associated with the fascia and somatic dysfunction.
Until next time, keep touching, feeling and healing osteopathically.
In Your Service,
Richard A. Feely, D.O. FAAO
AAO President
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Year of the Osteopathic Spirit
Presidential Note: April 26, 2010
Presidential Note: May 31, 2010
Presidential Note: June 14, 2010
Presidential Note: June 28, 2010
President's Message: April 15, 2010
President's Update: May 13, 2010
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