Leon Chaitow ND DO is a registered Osteopath and Naturopath and is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Westminster. He is author of over 70 books, edits the peer reviewed Journal of Bodywork & Movement Therapies, and practises in a NHS Health Centre and privately. He teaches widely to Physiotherapists, Osteopaths, Chiropractors and Massage Therapists. For further information Leon can be contacted at leonchaitow1@mac.com or via his website: www.leonchaitow.com
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A Learning Experience
Listed in clinical practice
We speak of integration and this is usually, in my experience, focused around the issues of how GPs (and sometimes hospitals) can find ways of working with CPs (complementary practitioners). The discussion is largely 'doctor' centred.
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A Shoulder Problem in Context
Listed in bodywork
In this column the author explores further the complexity theme of identical symptoms emerging from quite different backgrounds (discussed in a previous column which touched on breathing pattern disorders and back pain).
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Barriers to Integration are in our Minds
Listed in complementary medicine
I am starting this brief article by looking at boundaries between some complementary professions, but where this takes us is revolutionary – so please read on even if the words osteopathy and chiropractic make you glaze over!
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Bizarre Bazaar!
Listed in bodywork
This month’s column is bound to irritate some readers, and anger others, but as I have recently been both irritated and angered myself, this possibility seems to me worth while in order to unburden myself just a bit.
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Cause and Effect
Listed in environmental
The obscenity of feeding gentle vegetarian ruminants with minced up bits of other animals has resulted, not at all surprisingly – in ecological disaster...
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Cranial Influence - becoming a 'heavy pendulum'?
Listed in craniosacral therapy
The Upledger organisation in the US claim to have trained over 25,000 cranial therapists in the past 10 years[1] – and although the largest they are by no means the only training programme in this rapidly growing discipline.
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Ethics and Integration (or Incarceration)?
Listed in complementary medicine
In this short article, the author discusses ethics, safety and codes of conduct within both regulated and unregulated complementary medicine professions. As well as the ongoing need for an 'evidence base', there is also concern about education, training standards and professional behaviour.
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Fibromyalgia - Where Should Bodywork Fit Into An Integrated Treatment Picture?
Listed in fibromyalgia
This column looks into Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS), and its disabling levels of pain and stiffness, largely associated with the head, neck, spine and pelvis, commonly associated with chronic fatigue, severely disturbed sleep patterns, and gut problems – among many others.
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Insights & Questions
Listed in bodywork
Intuition is an area which fascinates many in the health care world. To some – the academically orientated in particular – it is an area to be disparaged and discouraged, whereas to many in the bodywork field in particular – intuitive methods are seen to be an integral and vital component of their work.
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Insights and Questions
Listed in bodywork
This month I am more, or less thinking aloud . . . and am unlikely to come to any final conclusions. Put simply I am wrestling with why the same phenomena observed by different people from varied disciplines should lead to such a variety of conclusions – and why so many therapeutic approaches based on these conclusions can all be successful – when their focus is so patently different.
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Integration: Malign or Benign
Listed in complementary medicine
According to Leon Chaitow there are two opposing views of the process of the integration of conventional and complementary medicine.
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Integrative Bodywork - Art and Science: Complexity in Bodywork
Listed in bodywork
Over the next few issues Leon Chaitow will be looking at how breathing patterns can affect health. He starts by citing that there are few cases of direct cause and effect situations for health and backs this statement up with a closer look at a recent US study. In this issue he looks at a study on back pain which concluded that patients suffering from chronic low back pain can clinically improve their condition with breathing therapy.
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Interdisciplinary Bodywork for Best Results
Listed in bodywork
Approximately one year ago I was teaching a group of physiotherapists the basics of osteopathic soft tissue manipulation, demonstrating a version of positional release technique (PRT) on the neck, when one of them asked me whether I was familiar with 'SNAGS', which is based on the work of a New Zealand physiotherapist, Brian Mulligan.
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Leptins and Inflammation
Listed in bodywork
In this column on bodywork, the author focuses on imbalances derived from hormones produced by white fatty tissue, particularly leptin (an area of fast evolving research).
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Meet the Endocannibanoids - Pleasure Producers, Pain Relievers - And Much More: The Bodywork Connection
Listed in bodywork
In this Expert Column, Leon Chaitow looks at our body’s ability to produce virtually identical chemicals to those that appear in cannabis.
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P.C., Gender, Interprofessional Discord and Integration
Listed in complementary medicine
In the Integrated Medicine column this month Leon Chaitow looks at several issues in alternative medicine where discord, confusion and imbalance exist within alternative medicine and within individual therapies and he wonders how complementary and conventional medicine can be integrated without sorting out these imbalances.
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Peace and Harmony in Holistic Medicine?
Listed in complementary medicine
Peace and Harmony in Holistic Medicine? You would think so but the truth is there exists a tendency, currently awesomely evident, for displays of mutual animosity, antagonism and frank antipathy between almost all groupings within the field of holistic/alternative/complementary health care in the UK.
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Respectable Energy
Listed in bodywork
This week I attended a post-graduation party at the University of Westminster. Candidates from the first intake of the MA in Therapeutic Bodywork had, with all due ceremony, received their well deserved degrees.
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Respecting Symptoms
Listed in bodywork
I suppose all complementary health care disciplines and systems agree that the body/mind complex is self-healing. That given the opportunity the self-regulating mechanisms will act in the best interests of the individual, always attempting to move towards the normalising of whatever is currently ‘wrong’.
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Spinal Manipulation - What are We to Believe?
Listed in back pain
In this column the author focuses on the background to a news report earlier this year that ‘Chiropractic and Osteopathic Manipulation does not work,’ based on a review published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine by Professor Edzard Ernst and his colleague.
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Standards in Massage Therapy
Listed in massage
A question which I am regularly asked deserves an honest answer. "How do you find the standard of massage therapist here compared with elsewhere?"
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Truth will out
Listed in bodywork
In 1988 I coauthored (with investigative journalist Simon Martin) a book with the title World Without AIDS (Thorsons) and in 1994 my other book on this topic You Don’t Have to Die (coauthored with Jim Stronheker) was published in the USA by The Burton Goldberg Group. In these books my coauthors and I documented the scandalous degree of misinformation which was emerging from official sources regarding this disease.
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What is Naturopathic Physical Medicine?
Listed in naturopathy
In this first of a series of articles on integrated treatment approaches in relation to Naturopathic Physical Medicine, the author focuses on the relative decline in interest in recent years, by Naturopathic Doctors (NDs), over the manual/ physical side of their health care provision, despite the existence of strong evidence on the potential benefit available from such treatments.
