Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Both concepts are familiar to contemporary osteopathic practitioners, but their incorporation into healthcare for evidence-informed, patient-centered care PCC remains unclear. By shifting professional practices towards evidence-based practices for manual therapy in line with the Western dominant biomedical paradigm, the latter group is challenging the osteopathic professional identity.
To alleviate this polarity, we would like to refocus on patient values and expectations, highlighting cultural diversity from an anthropological perspective. Increasing an awareness of diverse sociocultural health assumptions may foster culturally sensitive PCC, especially when including non-Western sociocultural belief systems of health into that person-centered care. Keywords: anthropology, medical, complementary therapies, culturally sensitive care, health belief model, historical osteopathic practices, historical osteopathic principles, manipulation, osteopathic, patient-centered care, medicine, traditional, Western healthcare.
Andrew Taylor Still, a Doctor of Medicine MD and Doctor of Osteopathy DO , was the founder of the osteopathic profession and a visionary who saw the cross-cultural potential of healthcare while living and working on the rural American frontier in the 19th century.
As an American physician who interacted with Native American populations, he became aware of their healing principles and created osteopathy as a unique healing system. The development, recognition, and regulation of the osteopathic profession throughout the world has been subject to the opposing viewpoints of an appreciation from the public and challenges from academics, especially for OPP that were contrary to the dominant Western biomedical system [ 2 ].
For example, manual skills historically introduced by the osteopathic profession, such as cranial and visceral techniques, are popular among specific patient populations, but the current evaluation of those techniques has failed to provide clinically meaningful or academically acceptable data [ 3 , 4 ]. Such manual interventions raise ethical concerns for patients when the underlying models are considered pseudoscience [ 5 ] and represent a clear academic challenge for educators.
