The power of osteopathy has always been best illustrated by the success individual patients report from receiving manipulative care. The ability to touch, identify real problems that may or may not be perceived by the patient, and to provide relief from or cure of those problems has allowed osteopathy to flourish throughout the 20th century into a global healthcare approach. Science, a process of observation to increase understanding, has developed technologies that significantly improve humans’ ability to make observations. Humanity now has the capacity and opportunity of not only seeing the individual patient at specific moments and extrapolating the effect of care over time, but to observe large numbers of people over extended periods of time to increase understanding of dysfunctions/pathologies and treatment outcomes. In the past decade, DO-Touch.NET has grown from a vision of promoting OMM research to a global practice-based research network, finding ways to help patients and clinicians better understand the impact of osteopathy. As DO-Touch.NET begins its second decade, it has a new 2020 vision to help the osteopathic manipulative medicine community incorporate and sustain technologies in their offices to improve their ability to observe conditions over time,
empower patients to actively contribute to a deeper understanding of their condition and how interventions promote their progression to health. Based on this process, evidence and not just anecdote will demonstrate the true power of osteopathy. This is our 2020 vision, purpose, and passion.
Category Archives: Network Updates
From the Director: Rationale for the Technique of the Month
The mission of DO-Touch.NET is to advance the science of osteopathy. There are great opportunities and challenges achieving this mission. One challenge is to assure that what we do, what we say we do, and why we do these approaches are comparable.
Continue reading From the Director: Rationale for the Technique of the MonthFrom the Director: Continuous quality improvement
Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is a process to assess what we are doing and how we can do it better. But how is CQI done for osteopathic manipulative care?
Continue reading From the Director: Continuous quality improvementFrom the Director: Moving Forward
DO-Touch.NET will remember 2017 as a year of unprecedented productivity. Our second study, the “OMM Utilization Study,” continues to progress into unforged territory.
Continue reading From the Director: Moving ForwardFrom the Director: Accident, Intention, or Observation
Whether it begins by accident (Pasteur and Penicillin) or by intention (AT Still and Osteopathy), advances in human existence occurs through systematically collected serial observations. In the 21st century, human kind is constantly collecting observations. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google estimates that “every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”
Continue reading From the Director: Accident, Intention, or ObservationFrom the Director: Reflections on 2016
Greetings and happy holidays!
Throughout many parts of the world, the end of the year is a time for thanksgiving, celebration, reflection, assessment, planning, and hope. Here at the administrative offices of DO-Touch.NET, the network whose purpose is to assist in advancing health through research on osteopathic manipulative medicine, we are thankful for the work that you do and your intention to contribute to real world research in OMM. In an era of great change within the healthcare system, it is critical now for clinicians and patients to proactively participate in shaping healthcare. One way of doing this is by contributing to research which establishes the evidence from which healthcare policy is created.
Continue reading From the Director: Reflections on 2016From the Director: DO-Touch.NET Activity
I hope this newsletter finds you well and that your summer has been full of activity, fun, and some rest. This summer we have been very active within DO-Touch.NET at the A.T. Still Research Institute and I am excited to tell you about our work.
Continue reading From the Director: DO-Touch.NET Activity
From the Director: Participation in the OMT safety study
As you are well aware, we are planning our 4th DO-Touch.NET Annual Meeting which will precede the AAO Convocation in Orlando, FL, on March 16, 2016. This pre-conference workshop will focus on adverse events in manual medicine and will offer up to 8.5 category 1-A CME credit at a reduced rate to DO-Touch.NET members.
Continue reading From the Director: Participation in the OMT safety studyFrom the Director: Studies begin and end.
It has been quite an exciting year for DO-Touch.NET. At the end of August we completed the data collection phase of the OMM Utilization Study funded by the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). We are preparing to launch our new OMT Adverse Events Study in November. We also had our third annual Network Membership Meeting in September. Yes, the network has been quite busy.
Our third annual Network Membership Meeting was quite a success, held in Kirksville on September 4-6. In attendance were representatives from Capital Region Medical Center, Jefferson City, MO; Crossroads Premiere Health Care, Corvallis, OR; Kirksville Family Medicine, Kirksville, MO; Kirksville OMM Clinic, Kirksville, MO; Midwestern University Clinic, Glendale, AZ; Rocky Mountain Integrative Medicine, Ridgway, CO; and William J. Brooks, DO, PC, Kansas City, MO. The meeting fostered insightful discussions surrounding diagnoses that are addressed with OMT, diversity of manual diagnostic and therapeutic skills, and input on how to improve our current studies. We also hosted our first webinar detailing an interim analysis of data from the OMM Utilization Study and overviewing the methods and tools we will use in the OMT Adverse Events Study. Replay of the webinar will be available to all DO-Touch.NET members, so watch your email for details. In addition, everyone in attendance received 20 hours of category 1A CME credit from the AOA at no cost. Overall, the third annual Network Membership Meeting was extremely productive and we hope you will join us next year for the fourth annual meeting!
I am pleased and eager to announce that DO-Touch.NET has received funding from the AAO and ATSU for our new study on patient-reported adverse events from OMT. Please see page two for an article detailing the study and how to get involved!
In addition, research from DO-Touch.NET was recently published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association on the preliminary findings of the pilot OMM Utilization Study (March 2014, Vol 114, No. 3, pp 154-170). Jane Johnson, DO-Touch.NET Associate Director, will be presenting additional findings from our pilot OMM Utilization Study at the OMED Annual Research Conference coming up in Seattle on October 26. Please come visit us at the poster session Sunday afternoon and see the product of the Network’s efforts. We look forward to seeing you all there.