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It’s a mixed bag by carroll2005

Manipulation therapy includes a lot of stuff. Some of it is basically just basic musculoskeletal work and stretches, similar to what a physical therapist would offer.

But it also includes a large grab-bag of quackery and hocus pocus such as “cranial manipulation” (believing you can manually move the bones of the skull and relieve various psychiatric and neurologic complaints), belief that you can palpate small intra-abdominal ganglia and regulate the GI tract by doing so - for a couple of examples.

The single “best” ever study of OMT showed that it was basically equivalent to physical therapy for treatment of acute low back pain. That study was over 20 years old but is still touted by DOs as the “evidence base” for much of what they do.

In reality, only a very small fraction of DOs actually use manipulation therapy in their practice. Most of them abandon it as soon as they pass their licensing exams.

It persists as a “thing” largely because it is the only way the leadership of the DO and the DO schools can justify their existence as a separate entity from the MD degree.