Respitory System

Pneumonia

Several studies looking at the effects of OMM on patients hospitalized with pneumonia all showed similar outcomes. People that received OMM during their stay:

  • Were discharged several days sooner

  • Spent fewer days on IV antibiotics

  • Experienced fewer deaths

  • Were less likely to move on to more serious illness requiring advanced medical intervention such as being placed in the ICU or on a ventilator

Asthma

Here’s an important principle in breathing. When you have a lungful of air, you have to exhale all of that air out before you have room to breathe new oxygen rich air in. It turns out breathing out is critically important. The lungs are made of alveoli, which are essentially lots of tiny balloons. When you breathe in they expand, exhale and they deflate to their original size and shape - or at least that’s what should happen.Asthma: Something happens that makes the airways tighten down as though the necks of the balloons are being pinched and only that little bit of squeaky air leaks out. In your hands that’s sputtering and funny; in your lungs its called wheezing. Everything is so tight you can’t push hard enough to get the air out, so you can’t breathe new air in. The inhalers we use, albuterol, causes those paths to open back up restoring normal breathing - OMM can help too.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) aka where you end up after years of smoking works differently. Instead of the neck and the path out being blocked you have really old, sad balloons. It’s the balloon equivalent of a sagging off of a 90 year- old basset hound. You breathe in, but there’s no elastic left in that balloon so the air just sits there. In some areas the balloons break down completely making really large sad floppy balloons where the air gave up trying to get out. We call that air trapping.

OMM can’t fix the state of the balloons, but it can and does optimize the support structures around them so they work better (ex, ribs, diaphragm, and other muscles). In terms of both asthma and chronic lung disease, OMM recipients consistently show improvement in both their total lung volume and the amount of that volume they are able to exhale (FEV and FEV1).

Works Cited

Pulmonary

  • Noll, DR, Degenhart, BF, Fossum, C, Hensel, K. Clinical and Research Protocol for Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment of Elderly Patients with Pneumonia, J Am Osteopath Assoc 2008; 108 506-512, 574-587

  • Guiney PA, Chao R, Vianna A, et al. Effects of Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment on pediatric patients with asthma: a randomized controlled trial. J Am. Osteopath Assoc: 2005; 105: 7-12.

  • Sleszynski SL and Kelso AF. Comparison of thoracic manipulation with incentive spirometry in preventing postoperative atelectasis. J Am Osteopath Assoc. 1993. 93(8): 834-8.