Resources for osteopaths (and anyone else who wants them)

This spreadsheet is something I prepared at uni, when I was learning my anatomy. It shows the muscles, their origins, insertions, groupings, innervation, spinal levels and actions. You can use it to look up specific information about a muscle, but can also, for example, use it to look up what muscles attach to a given bone, or what muscles are supplied by the nerves from a particular part of the spinal cord.

To find out what nerves attach to a particular bone, click on the arrow at the top of the “Concatenation” column. (This column combines all of the origins and insertions into a single column). Select “custom filter”, then “contains” and type the name of the bone you are interested in. Click “OK” and only the relevant muscles will be shown.

To find bring up a list of which muscles flex the forearm, select the arrow at the top of the “actions” column, and select “contains”, then type forearm. Select “and” and then “contains” in the next row, then “flexes”.

The frightening really is that we are living a world of increasing levels of biochemical imbalance. One of the clearest indications of this is the fact that when I was a child at school the canteen sold peanuts and peanut butter sandwiches. Today schools have sheets behind the staffroom wall with pockets with students’ photographs and epinephrine auto-injectors (EpiPens). There is normally one more than one every student with a pen per class. That can’t be put down to over-anxious parents. It can’t be put down to increasing awareness. There is a clear indication of breakdown of immune-regulation processes. We don’t really know why this is happening. Theories include: a general reduction of diversity of the gut biome, interfering with immune signalling; increased exposure to manufactured chemicals, both in the food supply and the general environment; increased exposure to electromagnetic radiation, which may be interfering with cell signalling; increased exposure to genetically-modified proteins; or and epidemic of vitamin D deficiency due to reduced exposure to sunlight. We don’t really know, though.

What we do find is that, once people are in a situation of what I call “biochemical burnout”, there is often a complex web of cause-and-effect that can be hard to unravel. I use this diagram to help patients to understand why their health issues have been hard to unravel, and also to understand what has and has not been looked at.

I have sheets that give more details of these conditions, and that spell out what is meant by each of the cause-and-effect arrows. I have not put these on to the web site; please contact me if you would like them.

Some time ago, I found myself getting confused about the way different hormones interact with one another. The more professional reading I did, the more interactions that I hadn’t been previously aware of that I discovered. And so I created a database where I could store information about them, including the ways in which they interacted. Eventually I decided to draw these interactions up as a diagram. This document was the result. The clinical implications are also discussed.