Theoretical Foundations and Efficacy of Osteopathy : a Philosophical Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND EFFICACY OF OSTEOPATHY: A philosophical approach Background: In recent years, osteopathy seems to be gaining popularity among patients. Anecdotal and empirical evidence is growing about the efficacy of this type of manual therapy. However, how the therapy works for different health conditions remains unclear, both in terms of mechanisms of action and contextual care factors surrounding successful treatment. Objectives: To explore the theoretical foundations of osteopathy and its conception of efficacy, provide initial clues into the epistemological status of osteopathy and to assess the legitimacy of this discipline within the evidence-based medicine system.Methods: We first conducted an exploratory focus group interview with the leaders and champions of a future Canadian Masteru2019s program of osteopathy to highlight issues concerning academic knowledge building. We also critically reviewed various scientific and philosophical literature to identify the scientific bases of osteopathy (e.g., concepts of holism and vitality), how efficacy is assessed in this research field, and how osteopathic interventions might operate beyond biomechanical theories. Results: The results of our focus group and critical literature review suggested that the concept of specific efficacy is not sufficient to explain how osteopathic interventions work, which opened up to alternative explanations: e.g. contextual placebo effect (practitioneru2019s effect, care ritual, etc.), natural course of illness/ physical condition, and regression to the mean. The suggestion of both the expected effects and mechanism of action of the treatment by the practitioner was also discussed as an alternative explanation to the efficacy of osteopathy.Discussion/Conclusion: These findings suggest the existence of two opposing dissonant visions of efficacy: one specific of the treatment and one contextual. The latter has to be considered in practice. Next step is to explore ethical issues related to treating while taking account of contextual effects in an evidence-based medicine system, as some CAMs practitioners seem to do.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".