Defining osteopathic medicine: can you put your finger on it?

Rogers • Editorial A of us have been in situations like this: You may have trained in a major medical center, you may work there now, or you may be attending a large educational symposium. You look around and you observe, “I am as good as anybody else here, but there is something different.” The problem is, can you put your finger on it? As members of a “hands-on” profession, we osteopathic physicians (DOs) have been defined by professional organizations and the public on the basis of our osteopathic manipulative treatment. While it represents a distinctive feature of our practice, the reality is that only a small number of DOs use osteopathic manipulative treatment as a defining part of their medical practice.1 For the majority of DOs, the distinctiveness of osteopathic practice is more difficult to define.