“Irritable bowel syndrome: hypothesis of osteopathic treatment "
Abstract: IBS or irritable bowel syndrome as defined by American authors, is a colon
functional disorder that can lead to the onset of clinical syndrome quite frequently.
The etiology is certainly complex, but in most cases it is believed, to have
psychosomatic origins while the importance of other factors cannot be excluded.
Very often, patients with irritable bowel syndrome have a particular personality defined
“obsessive-compulsive disorder”: mostly. These ordered, punctual, conscientious,
precise, methodical subjects live in a rather obsessive condition and under a conflicting
situation where aggressive instincts are constantly repressed.
Until recently, the clinical strategy and the therapeutic approach were almost
exclusively based upon the information derived from anatomical imaging and
administration of drugs to improve bowel functionality.
Scope of the study: to determine the effectiveness of osteopathic treatment in major
gastrointestinal diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome, which can then be taken
into account by the osteopathic medicine, especially in those patients who did not
achieve a satisfactory result only with the drug therapy which may cause unfavorable
side effects in a long run.
Method: in collaboration with a gastroenterologist in Savona, we conducted a study on
20 patients diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome; some of them presented
associated muscullskeletal symptoms such as back pain, sciatica, lowel limbs pain and
one had right shoulder pain. The osteopathic protocol was amended each time
according to the osteopathic fixations identified in each single patient; number of
sessions: 1 every 3 weeks for 3 times followed by 1 every 4 weeks for 2 times.
Results: The therapeutic response was positive only in 12 patients with improvement
of abdominal pain,decreased bloating feeling or abdominal distension, improvement in
the rate of bowel movement and improvement of intestinal disorders.
The associated bone and joint disorders disappeared in all patients.
As for the 8 patients who did not achieve positive results through our osteopathic
protocol, we believe that the reason relates to the strong psychosomatic aspect that we
did not take into consideration.
Conclusions: the osteopath preparation is very serious but in order to officially
acknowledge the Oateopathy, it is essential to value the scientific research and sustain
objectively the obtained results with numerical data. The overall osteopathic approach
does not treat the symptoms only, but looks for the primary cause of the problem, often
gets to results that the traditional rehabilitation therapy is not reaching, and particularly
is not maintaining stable over the time.
This study allowed us to compare the values registered before and after the treatment,
in order to confirm the hypothesis formulated during the initial clinical and osteopathic
evaluation, also allowing us to objectively quantify the positive outcomes in term of
numbers and to implement a selection of patients suitable for undergoing a “visceral”
type of osteopathic treatment rather than a “somato-emotional” one.
Keywords: IBS, Roma criteria, placebo, osteopathic tests, visceral manipulation.