Body world

The North-east Osteopaths group met at the Centre for Life last week and looked around the Body Works exhibition. These are real cadavers which have been 'plasticised' and dissected to reveal our human anatomy. It was fascinating to see beneath the skin, it's many years since I attended dissection classes when I was training, and in some cases really made sense of what I palpate every day in my working life. Osteopathy is such a hands on discipline. We use so many different techniques and approaches including articulation, muscle energy manipulation and massage to education, mindfulness and exercise yet it is all based on the premiss of what we can feel. Most of the exhibition I felt really was useful just to see what's there.

Some of the exhibits I found to be less informative, perhaps showmanship triumphing over education? It was hard to imagine these bodies as living people despite some of the poses they had been put in, on a tight rope or a rock guitarist for example. And once I'd marvelled at the anatomy displayed in the exhibition I remembered again that our skeleton needs to be alive and mobile so that it can express it's person. Those living statues we see in our town centres are spooky because they display no emotion. It's not just the dead pan faces, a person can be identified by their posture, the way they move. Their mood can be exposed in the way they hold themselves, the way their feet move over the ground or in the way they respond and echo others movements. People in pain often struggle because they limit their movements, they become frightened to use their body. It's one of the finest moments of my day when I see some-one who had lost their ability to express themselves with their musculo-skeletal system come back to being comfortable in their own skin.