The landscape of healthcare in Australia is shifting rapidly. We now are seeing the likes of general practitioners shift into more specialised roles now offering a range of health services including General Medicine, Aged Care, Chronic Disease Management, Skin Cancer Checks and Excisions, Men’s Health, Family Planning, Travel Medicine, Women and Children’s Health, Antenatal Shared Care, Cosmetic Medicine, Musculoskeletal Interventions and Sports Medicine, Bio Identical hormone practitioners to holistic health practitioners of Integrative Medicine referring to themselves as Holistic doctors. We have practitioners of general dentistry beginning to utilise orthodontic approaches to treatment in their practices. Physiotherapists utilising HVLA (High Velocity Low Amplitude-manipulative approaches) techniques even though not taught at undergraduate level, to allied health practitioners incorporating ‘dry needling’ as part of their treatment protocol. This is no different to practitioners of osteopathic medicine, such as ourselves, shifting our treatment protocol at this practice from a general mechanical model as taught at an undergraduate level to a more specialised area of interest that utilises a regenerative/preservative model of medicine based on a cellular level as an approach to treating a wide range of musculoskeletal problems.
This landscape has had to shift as we are now living longer, seeing more patients with age related issues of chronic pain and osteoarthritis. As with all practitioners that have diversified into a specialised field, further education has been a requirement and we at this practice are no different, so have undertaken extensive post graduate training to be able to deliver these various treatment methods.