Summary: My Osteopathic Experience

As a student interested in medicine, I began to explore the various aspects of the field. I was first introduced to osteopathic medicine when I began shadowing a physician who specialized in the field of orthopedic surgery. My goal from this experience was to gain a better insight into the types of treatments osteopathic medicine provides for patients. While observing, I would often have discussions with the physician about what makes osteopathic medicine an intricate part of medical practices. Through our conversations I learned of the emphasis placed treatment of all aspects of the patients body, both mentally and physically, in order to provide a more direct form of treatment. The exposure to doctor-patient interactions showed me the various …show more content…
Spending time in the surgical center came to be a humbling and greatly influential experience. Most surgeries I observed were performed in order to fix an injury or source of pain for the patients, an operation patients were often happy to have done. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and one patient I came to know required a surgery that would change the way he was able to function for the rest of his life. The man had been suffering from nerve damage in one of his legs due to his diabetic condition. It had reached the point to where the leg had begin to die from his foot to the patellar region. The man was now faced with losing this entire region of his leg or facing more a serious condition and I cant begin to imagine what he was feeling in this situation. This was the first direct exposure I had to the field of medicine not always providing patients with the desirable outcome. It was a highly influential experience that left me with the understanding that medical practice is not always about providing patients with the most desirable outcome, but instead, the outcome that will provide them with greatest possibility from a bad