The Body Already Knows

An Essay on Osteopathy, the Medical Heresy That Started from Anatomy and Never Left

In the spring of 1864, a frontier doctor in Kansas stood over the bodies of three children — two his own, one adopted — all dead from spinal meningitis. Four physicians had attended them. Prayers had been said. Every remedy the medical profession possessed had been administered. None of it worked.

Andrew Taylor Still, a licensed physician and surgeon who had served in the Civil War, looked at those three small bodies and asked a question that would cost him everything: “In sickness has God left man in a world of guessing? Guess what is the matter? What to give, and guess the result?”¹

He decided the answer was no. The doctors had been faithful. The prayers had been earnest. The remedies were the best the profession could offer. All of it amounted to what Still would later call “a system of blind guess work” — dosing and hoping, adding and subtracting chemicals in the dark, with no understanding of why the body was failing and no capacity to support its recovery.¹ The marble lambs in the cemeteries, he observed, testified to the results.

From that decision — made in grief, confirmed over the next decade through relentless anatomical study and clinical experimentation — he built an entire system of medicine from the ground up. Not by adding to what existed, but by rejecting it wholesale and returning to the human body itself as both the source of disease and the source of cure.

That system is osteopathy. And it has almost nothing to do with the back-cracking caricature that the word conjures in most people’s minds.

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The Divorce

Still did not tinker with medicine. He left it.

“I have spent thirty years of my life reading and following rules and remedies used for curing,” he wrote in 1899, “and learned in sorrow it was useless to listen to their claims, for instead of getting good, I obtained much harm therefrom. I asked for, and obtained a mental divorce from them, and I want it to be understood that drugs and I are as far apart as the East is from the West; now, and forever.”²

This was not the language of a reformer. It was a declaration of war. Still described his break from allopathic medicine in the language of a court proceeding: “I based my charge upon the foundation of murder, ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance.”¹ The date he gave for his discovery — June 22, 1874 — he treated as a founding, the way nations mark the day they declared independence.

His former colleagues responded accordingly. Some asked God to take him. He was shunned in his own community. His brother, a minister, doubted him. The medical establishment treated him as a crank at best, a dangerous lunatic at worst.¹

Still did not waver. He spent the next two decades practising his new method on the Kansas frontier, refining it through thousands of clinical encounters, and in 1892 — at the age of sixty-four — he opened the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri.³ Within a decade, students were flooding in from across the country. Whatever Still was doing, it was working in ways that orthodox medicine could not explain and did not want to examine.

The Core Insight

Still did not discover a technique. He arrived at a fundamentally different way of seeing the human body.

The medicine of his era — and ours — operates on an implicit assumption: the body is essentially stupid. It gets sick because things go wrong, and the doctor’s job is to intervene from outside with substances or procedures that correct what the body cannot correct on its own. The body is a passive recipient of disease and a passive recipient of treatment.

Still looked at the same body and saw something different. He saw a self-correcting, self-healing system of extraordinary sophistication — an organism that already contains, as he put it, “drugs in abundance to cure all infirmities.”¹ The body manufactures its own pharmacy. It regulates its own temperature, rebuilds its own tissues, fights its own infections, balances its own chemistry. It does all of this without instruction from a physician. It has been doing it for millions of years.

Disease, in Still’s framework, is not something that attacks the body from outside and must be defeated by chemical warfare. Disease is what happens when the body’s own self-regulating mechanisms are obstructed. Something is blocking the flow — of blood, of nerve impulse, of lymph, of cerebrospinal fluid. Remove the obstruction, and the body does what it was designed to do. It heals itself.

“To find health should be the object of the doctor,” Still wrote. “Anyone can find disease.”²

That single sentence inverts the entire orientation of Western medicine. The allopathic doctor is trained to identify pathology, name it, and attack it. The osteopath is trained to find what is preventing health and remove the impediment. One hunts disease. The other hunts health. They are not doing the same thing with different tools. They are looking at the human body with fundamentally different eyes.

The Four Principles

Osteopathic philosophy rests on four principles that Still derived from anatomy, physiology, and decades of clinical observation. They are simple to state and radical in their implications.

The body is a unit. Not a collection of parts, not a set of systems that happen to occupy the same space, but an integrated whole in which every structure is connected to every other structure. The pain in your foot may originate in your lumbar spine. The dysfunction in your gut may trace to a misalignment in your thoracic vertebrae. Still spent entire chapters of his Philosophy tracing a single complaint through five anatomical divisions — foot, leg, thigh, pelvis, lumbar spine — searching methodically for the structural origin of a distant symptom.² Isolate a symptom from its context, and you have already misunderstood it.

Structure governs function. A compressed nerve does not conduct properly. A restricted blood vessel does not deliver adequate supply. A bound fascia does not permit normal movement. These are not metaphors. They are mechanical facts with physiological consequences. If the physical structure of the body is properly aligned — bones in place, fascia mobile, fluids flowing — then the body functions normally. When structure is disturbed, function degrades. The osteopath does not treat the dysfunction. The osteopath corrects the structure and lets the function restore itself.²

The rule of the artery is supreme. Blood must flow. Still wrote that the osteopath “saves, or loses, his patients, just in proportion to his ability to sustain the artery to feed, and the veins to purify.”² Wherever arterial supply is obstructed, tissue starves. Wherever venous return is blocked, waste accumulates. Wherever lymphatic drainage is impeded, the system becomes toxic. The osteopath’s job is to ensure unobstructed circulation — not by adding anything to the blood, but by removing whatever mechanical obstacle prevents it from reaching where it needs to go.

The body possesses self-healing mechanisms. This is the principle that separates the two systems of medicine at the root. The body is not waiting for a doctor. The immune system is already fighting. The tissues are already rebuilding. The chemistry is already rebalancing. The doctor’s role is not to take over this process but to remove whatever structural impediment is preventing it from completing.²

All four principles derive from anatomy. Still was explicit about this: “A knowledge of anatomy is all you want or need, as it is all you can use or ever will use in your practice, although you may live one hundred years.”²

The Fascia: Still’s Most Radical Observation

Of all Still’s anatomical observations, his writing on fascia stands the farthest ahead of his time.

“I know of no part of the body that equals the fascia as a hunting ground,” he wrote. “I believe that more rich golden thought will appear to the mind’s eye as the study of the fascia is pursued than any division of the body.”²

In 1899, this was eccentric. Fascia — the continuous web of connective tissue that surrounds and penetrates every muscle, organ, nerve, and blood vessel in the body — was regarded by anatomists as packing material. It was what you cut through to get to the interesting structures. It was routinely discarded during dissection.

Still saw it differently. He described the fascia as “the ground in which all causes of death do the destruction of life.”² He argued that disease processes begin and end in the fascia. He described it as a continuous system — not isolated wrappings around individual muscles but a single interconnected web that links the entire body, from the surface of the skin to the deepest organs. He called it “the place to look for cause of disease and the place to consult and begin the action of remedies in all diseases.”²

It took more than a century for mainstream anatomy to begin catching up.

In 2001, Thomas Myers published Anatomy Trains, mapping what he called myofascial meridians — continuous lines of connective tissue that run through the body, linking distant structures into functional chains.⁴ Myers demonstrated that the fascial system is not a collection of discrete wrappings but a single continuous web. He cited the work of James Oschman, who described the extracellular matrix as “a continuous and dynamic supermolecular webwork extending into every nook and cranny of the body” — a nuclear matrix within a cellular matrix within a connective tissue matrix.⁴ When you touch a human body, you touch the whole thing. There is no part that is not connected to every other part through this web.

Myers introduced the concept of tensegrity — a structural principle borrowed from architecture in which compression elements (bones) float within a continuous tension network (fascia, ligaments, tendons). The body does not stand up because bones stack on top of each other like bricks. It stands up because bones are suspended within a pre-stressed fascial web that distributes force throughout the entire structure.⁴ Change the tension at one point and you change the geometry everywhere.

Still did not use the word tensegrity. But his clinical method was built on precisely this understanding. When he found a vertebra displaced, he did not treat it as a local problem. He traced its implications through the entire structure — through the fascia, the blood supply, the nerve pathways, the lymphatic drainage — because he understood that the body is not an assembly of parts. It is a tensional whole.

The First International Fascia Research Congress did not occur until 2007.⁵ The scientific community is now producing papers on fascial proprioception, fascial contractility, fascial innervation, and the role of fascia in pain transmission — observations that Still made from the dissecting table in the 1880s. He did not have the molecular biology. He had the anatomy and the clinical results.

The Cranial Concept: Sutherland’s Extension

William Garner Sutherland graduated from the American School of Osteopathy in 1900, having studied directly under Still. For the next several decades, he extended osteopathic thinking into territory that remains controversial to this day.⁶

Sutherland’s observation was this: the bones of the skull are not fused solid. They are joined by sutures that permit a small but palpable degree of movement. This movement is not random. It is rhythmic, involuntary, and present in every living person. Sutherland called it the Primary Respiratory Mechanism — a slow, tide-like motion that he believed was driven by the fluctuation of cerebrospinal fluid and expressed through the membranes and bones of the cranium.⁶

Still had already identified cerebrospinal fluid as “the highest known element that is contained in the human body.”² Sutherland took this observation and built an entire clinical approach around it. He trained his hands to detect the cranial rhythm, to identify restrictions in its expression, and to facilitate its restoration.⁶

Harold Magoun, one of Sutherland’s students, systematised these teachings in Osteopathy in the Cranial Field (1951), which became the standard textbook for cranial osteopathy and remains in use today.⁷

Mainstream medicine dismissed cranial osteopathy. The claim that cranial bones move was treated as self-evidently absurd. The studies that were funded generally measured whether different practitioners could palpate the same rhythm on the same patient — interrater reliability tests — and the results were mixed.

But the question of whether cranial bones exhibit micromotion has been answered. Cranial sutures do not fully ossify in most adults. They retain fibrous, vascular tissue that permits small degrees of movement. The bones move. The open question is whether the movement is clinically significant and whether practitioners can reliably detect and influence it.

Large-scale clinical trials on cranial osteopathy do not exist. This tells you nothing about whether it works and everything about who funds research. There is no pharmaceutical product at the end of the inquiry. There is no device to patent. There is only a pair of trained hands and a patient.

The Nervous System: Korr’s Bridge

Irvin Korr was not an osteopath. He was a physiologist — a bench scientist who spent over fifty years at osteopathic medical colleges providing the neurological evidence for what osteopaths observed with their hands.

Korr spent over fifty years at osteopathic medical colleges, beginning in the late 1940s, conducting laboratory research into the physiological mechanisms underlying what osteopaths observed clinically.⁸ His central contribution was the concept of the facilitated segment — the finding that a vertebral segment subjected to chronic mechanical stress develops a lowered neurological threshold. The nerves at that segment become hyperexcitable. They fire more easily, respond more intensely, and maintain higher baseline activity than normal segments.⁸

This has cascading consequences. The facilitated segment acts as a neurological lens, focusing autonomic nervous system activity on whatever organs and tissues those nerves supply. A facilitated segment in the thoracic spine, for example, may produce chronic overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system to the heart, the lungs, or the digestive organs. The organs themselves are structurally sound. The problem is upstream — in the spinal segment that governs them.⁸

Consider what this means in a clinic. A patient with chronic digestive complaints may receive years of pharmaceutical management — antacids, proton pump inhibitors, motility agents — while the structural disturbance in the thoracic spine that is driving the autonomic dysfunction goes unexamined. The drugs suppress the symptoms. The facilitated segment remains. Stop the drugs and the symptoms return, because the cause was never addressed. It was never even looked for.

Korr’s research also demonstrated that somatic dysfunction — the osteopathic term for a segment of the body where structure is disturbed and function is impaired — produces measurable changes in the electrical resistance of the skin, the temperature of the surface tissues, and the activity of the muscles overlying the affected segment.⁸ These are laboratory measurements — objective, repeatable, and correlating precisely with what the osteopath’s hands detect through palpation.

Korr’s research gave laboratory confirmation to what Still had stated as clinical principle: structure governs function, and spinal mechanics affect visceral health. The mechanism Korr identified — segmental facilitation — is a direct, measurable pathway from structural disturbance to systemic disease. The mechanism requires nothing beyond anatomy and neurophysiology.

The 1978 collection Neurobiologic Mechanisms in Manipulative Therapy, edited by Korr, brought together research from multiple laboratories demonstrating the neurological effects of manual therapy — including changes in muscle tone, autonomic activity, pain thresholds, and reflex patterns following manipulative treatment.⁹ Bench science, documenting mechanisms that the osteopathic profession had been using clinically for eighty years.

Porges and the Autonomic Revolution

When Stephen Porges published The Polyvagal Theory in 2011, osteopaths recognised their patients on every page.¹⁰

Porges described neuroception — the nervous system’s continuous, subconscious assessment of safety and threat. The autonomic nervous system, he argued, is not a simple two-state switch between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic rest. It operates on a three-tier hierarchy, shaped by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.¹⁰

The oldest tier — the unmyelinated vagus — governs immobilisation and shutdown. The middle tier — the sympathetic system — governs mobilisation and defence. The newest — the myelinated vagus, unique to mammals — governs social engagement, bonding, and the felt sense of safety.¹⁰

When the nervous system reads the environment as safe, the social engagement system runs: heart rate is regulated, breathing is calm, the face and voice are expressive, digestion proceeds normally. When threat is detected, the system drops down the hierarchy — first to sympathetic mobilisation (anxiety, hypervigilance, inflammation), then, if escape fails, to dorsal vagal shutdown (dissociation, collapse, immune suppression).¹⁰

Any osteopath reading Porges recognises the patients immediately. A body locked in sympathetic overdrive — anxious, inflamed, sleepless, digestion in ruins — is a body whose self-healing mechanisms are suppressed. The system is spending its resources on defence rather than maintenance.

The osteopath’s work — restoring structural integrity, freeing restricted tissues, allowing fluids to flow — may directly shift the patient’s autonomic state from sympathetic defence to parasympathetic restoration. Not through suggestion. Not through placebo. Through the neurophysiological pathways that Porges mapped. Skilled, safe touch registers in the nervous system as a signal of safety. The social engagement system activates. The body shifts from guarding to repairing.

Still said the body heals itself when the obstructions are removed. Porges described the neural architecture that makes this possible.

The Practitioner’s Art: Fulford, Jones, and the Lineage

Everything discussed so far — the philosophy, the anatomy, the science — can be read in a book. The thing that cannot be read in a book is the art. Osteopathy is transmitted hand to hand, at the treatment table, through a quality of touch that takes years to develop.

Robert Fulford practised for over fifty years, from 1941 into the 1990s. His book Dr. Fulford’s Touch of Life (1996) remains the most accessible introduction to osteopathic thinking written for a general audience.¹¹ Andrew Weil, the Harvard-trained physician, wrote that if medicine is to realign with great healing traditions, it must rediscover the truths that Fulford expresses.¹¹

Fulford worked with what he described as the body’s vital force — the animating energy that distinguishes a living body from a cadaver. His clinical approach was gentle, often using percussion vibration to release restrictions that other methods could not reach. He treated infants, the elderly, and patients who had failed every other intervention. His results were extensively documented by his patients and colleagues, though rarely by the kind of controlled trials that mainstream medicine demands.¹¹

Lawrence Jones developed Strain-Counterstrain in the 1960s — a technique based on positioning the body to relieve tender points rather than forcing tissues into alignment.¹² Jones discovered that by moving the patient toward comfort rather than away from restriction, the neuromuscular system spontaneously released patterns of tension that direct manipulation could not resolve. The technique is gentle, non-invasive, and effective for conditions that resist more forceful approaches.¹²

Bonnie Gintis, in Engaging the Movement of Life (2007), described an osteopathic approach rooted in embodiment and the practitioner’s capacity to perceive the body’s inherent motility — the subtle, involuntary movement present in all living tissue.¹³ Her work represents the tradition flowing through Sutherland and into a contemporary understanding that incorporates somatic awareness, embryological development, and the practitioner’s own state of being as a therapeutic instrument.

These practitioners did not simply apply techniques. They developed a quality of perception — of listening with their hands — that is the hallmark of the osteopathic tradition and the thing that is hardest to convey in writing. Still described the osteopath as “an artist” who must carry “a living picture of all or any part of the body in your mind as a ready painter carries the picture of the face.”² Fulford described the practitioner’s primary tool as attention.¹¹ Sutherland told his students to develop “thinking fingers.”⁶

The lineage matters. Sutherland studied under Still. Rollin Becker — whose collected works are considered among the most profound in osteopathic literature — studied under Sutherland for the last decade of Sutherland’s life. Anne Wales, who edited Sutherland’s primary teaching text, practised into her nineties. Each generation transmitted not just knowledge but perceptual capacity — the trained ability to place hands on a living body and feel what is moving and what is stuck, what is vital and what is compromised, what the body is trying to do and what is preventing it.

Call it what you want. It is skill — the same kind of skill that allows a master mechanic to hear a misalignment in an engine, or a musician to hear a quarter-tone out of pitch. It develops through years of practice, thousands of hours of palpation, and a quality of attention that the modern medical curriculum does not cultivate and cannot measure on a standardised exam. The osteopathic tradition has always been transmitted primarily hand to hand, practitioner to student, at the treatment table. Books can describe the philosophy. Only hands can teach the art.

The Contrast: Two Models of Medicine

Place these two systems side by side and the differences are not matters of emphasis. They are structural.

The allopathic physician begins with pathology. What is the disease? What is the diagnosis? What intervention will suppress the symptoms or eliminate the pathogen? The physician is the active agent, the patient the recipient, the tools external — drugs, surgery, radiation. The body is the battlefield. The disease is the enemy.

The osteopath begins with a different question entirely: where is the health in this patient, and what is obstructing its expression? The body is the active agent. The physician’s hands are the tools. The work is removal — of mechanical restrictions, of structural distortions, of whatever is preventing the body from doing what it already knows how to do.

One system isolates. It separates the body into specialties — cardiology, gastroenterology, neurology, orthopaedics — each examining its organ system as though it operates in isolation. The cardiologist does not examine the thoracic spine. The gastroenterologist does not palpate the diaphragm. The neurologist does not check whether the cranial bones are freely mobile. The other system integrates. It treats the body as a unit because the body is a unit. The fascia that wraps the heart is continuous with the fascia that lines the diaphragm, which is continuous with the fascia that surrounds the kidneys, which is continuous with the fascia of the pelvic floor. Pull on one end and the other end moves.

The word allopathic itself is revealing. It comes from the Greek allos (other) and pathos (suffering) — treatment by introducing something other than the disease. Give a fever reducer for fever. An anti-inflammatory for inflammation. An antidepressant for depression. An antibiotic for infection. The prefix anti- runs through the entire pharmacopoeia. The model is suppressive: identify the symptom and oppose it with a chemical agent.

Osteopathy asks a prior question: why is the body producing this symptom? Fever is not a malfunction. It is the body’s immune response — a deliberate raising of temperature to create an inhospitable environment for pathogens. Inflammation is not a disease. It is a repair mechanism — the body flooding an injured area with immune cells and increased blood flow. Suppressing these processes with drugs may relieve discomfort, but it also suppresses the body’s own healing response. The symptom goes away. The underlying cause remains.

Still put this bluntly in 1899: the allopathic physician “hitches up many kinds of drugs hoping that a few of them may be able to carry the burden. He bridles his horses with opium, loads them down with purgative powders, and whips them through with castor oil.”² The language is nineteenth-century. The observation is current. The modern version swaps opium for opioids, purgatives for proton pump inhibitors, and castor oil for biologics, but the logic is unchanged: suppress the symptom, manage the condition, maintain the patient as a consumer of pharmaceutical products for the duration of their life.

The two systems rest on incompatible premises about what the body is and what the doctor’s role should be. They cannot be blended without one swallowing the other. This is why Still did not seek reform. He sought divorce.

What Was Lost

In 1962, the California Medical Association and the California Osteopathic Association reached an agreement. California’s osteopathic physicians were offered M.D. degrees. The osteopathic college in Los Angeles was converted to a conventional medical school. In exchange, osteopaths gained full practice rights and hospital privileges.³

Similar pressures operated nationwide over the following decades. The American Osteopathic Association sought parity with allopathic medicine. D.O. programs expanded their pharmaceutical and surgical curricula. Residency programs merged. By the twenty-first century, the distinction between a D.O. and an M.D. in American clinical practice had become, in many cases, nominal.³

The profession gained respectability. It lost its soul.

Nobody disproved the original osteopathic insight — that the body is a self-healing unit, that structure governs function, that the physician’s role is to remove obstructions rather than add chemicals. No better science replaced it. The profession simply traded its founding vision for institutional legitimacy and the economic advantages of practising within the allopathic system.

What this meant in practice: D.O. students spent progressively more time learning pharmacology and less time developing their hands. The hours devoted to osteopathic manipulative medicine — the core clinical skill of the profession — shrank from a central pillar of the curriculum to an elective footnote. A graduating D.O. in 2025 may have hundreds of hours of pharmaceutical training and a few dozen hours of palpation. The ratio tells you which model won.

The loss shows up in the clinic every day. A physician trained to think structurally — to examine the thoracic spine when the patient presents with cardiac arrhythmia, to palpate the diaphragm when the patient presents with acid reflux, to check the cranial rhythm when the patient presents with chronic headache — sees things that a physician trained to think pharmacologically will never see. The latter may be equally intelligent. They were simply never taught to look. The education determines the perception. The perception determines the treatment.

Still saw this coming. In his preface to Philosophy of Osteopathy, he warned against those who were “drinking from the fountains of old schools of drugs, dragging back the science to the very systems from which I divorced myself so many years ago.”²

Outside the United States, a different story unfolded. In the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of Europe, osteopathy remained a separate profession — manual practitioners working with their hands, maintaining the philosophical framework that Still established.³ The split in the profession is itself revealing: where osteopathy was absorbed into allopathic medicine, it diluted. Where it maintained its independence, it preserved its identity.

The American Medical Association’s campaign against osteopathy was economic and political before it was ever scientific. The AMA fought chiropractic with similar ferocity and for similar reasons — competing systems that threatened the allopathic monopoly on healthcare.³ The scientific objections arrived after the institutional decision to suppress had already been made.

What the Body Knows

Strip osteopathy down to a single proposition and this is what remains: the body already knows how to heal.

Knit a broken bone. Seal a wound. Neutralise a pathogen. Regulate its own temperature, balance its own chemistry, coordinate its own movements, and maintain its own structural integrity through decades of use. The body does all of this before a doctor arrives and will continue doing it after the doctor leaves.

Doctors are not unnecessary. But their job is not what most of them think it is. The osteopathic physician does not heal the patient. The patient heals the patient. The physician creates the conditions under which healing becomes possible — restoring structural alignment, freeing restricted tissues, ensuring adequate fluid circulation, supporting the nervous system’s capacity to shift from defence to repair.

Still saw this clearly in 1899. Korr documented the neurological pathways in the 1950s through the 1970s. Porges mapped the autonomic hierarchy in 2011. Myers traced the fascial continuities in 2001. The science, arriving piecemeal over a century, is converging on what a frontier doctor in Kansas observed with his hands and his attention 150 years ago: the body is an integrated, self-regulating, self-healing system, and the physician’s highest calling is not to override it but to get out of its way.

Nobody is connecting these threads. Fascia researchers are rediscovering what Still wrote about in 1899. Neuroscientists studying the autonomic nervous system are mapping pathways that Korr identified in the 1950s. Trauma researchers drawing on Porges’ polyvagal theory are describing relationships between structural holding patterns and autonomic dysregulation that cranial osteopaths have been treating for seventy years. The streams are converging, but they are converging outside the institutions that could most benefit from the synthesis — because those institutions are built around the pharmaceutical model that osteopathy was founded to oppose.

If the body already contains what it needs to heal, why does the dominant medical system operate as though it doesn’t? You cannot patent a pair of hands. You cannot sell a monthly prescription for structural alignment. You cannot build a billion-dollar revenue stream on the principle that the body heals itself when the obstructions are removed. The economics of modern medicine require a dependent patient. Osteopathy produces an independent one.

“You as Osteopathic machinists can go no farther than to adjust the abnormal condition, in which you find the afflicted,” Still told his students. “Nature will do the rest.”²

Nature is still waiting.

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References

1. Still, A.T. Autobiography of Andrew T. Still (1897).

2. Still, A.T. Philosophy of Osteopathy (1899).

3. Lewis, J. A.T. Still: From the Dry Bone to the Living Man (Dry Bone Press, 2012).

4. Myers, T.W. Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, 3rd ed. (Churchill Livingstone, 2014).

5. First International Fascia Research Congress, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 2007.

6. Sutherland, W.G. Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, edited by Anne L. Wales (Rudra Press, 1990).

7. Magoun, H.I. Osteopathy in the Cranial Field, 1st ed. (The Cranial Academy, 1951).

8. Korr, I.M. The Collected Papers of Irvin M. Korr, Vol. 1 (American Academy of Osteopathy, 1979).

9. Korr, I.M. (ed.) Neurobiologic Mechanisms in Manipulative Therapy (Springer, 1978).

10. Porges, S.W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (W.W. Norton, 2011).

11. Fulford, R.C. Dr. Fulford’s Touch of Life: The Healing Power of the Natural Life Force (Pocket Books, 1996).

12. Jones, L.H. Strain-Counterstrain (Jones Strain-Counterstrain, 1995).

13. Gintis, B. Engaging the Movement of Life: Exploring Health and Embodiment Through Osteopathy and Continuum (North Atlantic Books, 2007).