Regulation and training

Regulation

All osteopaths are regulated by the General Osteopathic Council. All practitioners must have undergone a recognised training course, have to maintain insurance and need to keep up to date with training.

Training

It is a statutory requirement for all osteopaths to complete 30 hours of training each year. Below are some of the recent courses attended by Duncan Larter.

First Aid 26th July 2009:  I attended this course at Health and Safety Training Services in Hull, a very interesting and useful day with new methods for some first aid techniques.

Alliance Medical, York 21 November 2009
We listened to Christine Anderton speak on MRI. I found this useful, as we saw a scan in real time of a knee, learnt about low magnetic field scanning for extremities, saw a lot of scan images with explanations of their meaning and went through reasons not to have a scan performed.

13 th March 2010
NCSO meeting. The main part of the course was presented by an osteopath who uses ultrasound as a diagnostic modality to investigate tendon problems and to screen for blood vessel problems. This was interesting as some practical work followed and it was relatively simple to image the tendons of the biceps and rotator cuff. A demonstration of the aortic scan was performed. Various machines were on display and there was discussion of the clinical relevance and reasoning involved.

8th May 2010

Northern Counties Society of Osteopaths meeting, looking at relationships between weak muscles and specific joint problems. I found this helpful as I sometimes use a similiar system of diagnosis to find out what is making a muscle function poorly.

12th & 13th June 2010

Northern Counties Society of Osteopaths Convention

A speaker presented a different view of spinal load and an enhanced role of the muscles in supporting load, with website links to new research and exercises. The orthodox and osteopathic approaches to the thorax and abdomen helped to enhance case history taking and clinical decision making plus provided a practical technique approach. The knee talk gave me a much better understanding of meniscal tears. The hip arthroscopy talk gave me new information which I hope to use with complex hip diagnosis problems. The wrist talk was very clearly set out with a useful method of classifying wrist conditions.