“Osteopathy is another branch of medicine, another technique of diagnosis and treatment.” These words explain what Amaia Estanga osteopathy is. He says that it is sometimes difficult to explain what it is and that it is better to test it: “The goal is to identify what is happening in the body to prevent repeated injuries and develop tools.”

It combines osteopathy with physiotherapy according to the needs of the patient, but above all osteopathy because it diagnoses “better”: “I use it to diagnose and treat and in the end I do a little physiotherapy to release more”. However, if you observe that it becomes “more difficult” because the patient prefers physiotherapy, it adapts to the patient’s expectations.

He adds that the attitude of the patient influences a lot and that for many it is “very rare” to work with the eyes closed and in silence: “When treating we always feel something, but when patients do not feel it they have another sensitivity, they think we have done nothing”. He says that in these cases they complain, but there are some who then see an improvement and apologize for the attitude.

Osteopathy is based on three general principles: spontaneous cure, integrity and movement. “All bodies have the ability to heal themselves, but when circumstances prevent it, we help to restart spontaneous healing through osteopathy,” he explains.

In addition, he says that one must look at the injuries from a collective and global perspective: “All the tissues are connected and something that is in one place can affect the other.”

Listening to the body

He adds that the body has movement before being born spontaneously and that upon treating it they feel with their hands: “If movement is lost, an injury occurs, for example, if the liver loses movement, it stays still, and because it does not perform well, for example, it can occur that it has shoulder pain”. The goal is, therefore, to reactivate the movement through physiotherapy “It is important to listen to the body as far as there is no movement”.

Given the impossibility of performing an osteopathy in the Public Health System of Hego Euskal Herria and the difficulty of access to the lists, Estanga attends in private: “Demonstrated as it is not legal and scientifically proven, we cannot do anything and if we cheat there are risks”. In Iparralde, on the contrary, there are more opportunities.

Estanga believes that the lack of opportunities is to “put aside” and “privatize” other ways of working: “I would do it at ease in public work, but we are limited.” He adds that it is not given sufficient importance: “These are four years of study and we have to control physiology and anatomy; in other countries, osteopaths have more prestige”.