Letter to the Editor Regarding “A global view of osteopathy – Mirror or echo chamber”

Making sense of cranial osteopathy: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

“…The intra-professional debates about cranial osteopathy that have been recorded in the pages of the International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine in the past few decades (Hartman, 2006a;Maddick and Korth, 2006;Hartman, 2006b;Maddick, 2007;McGrath, 2015;King, 2016;Zegarra-Parodi and Cerritelli, 2016;Monro et al, 2017) can be understood as the 'boundary work' demarcating the values of one group from those of another when a profession is jostling for assimilation into the mainstream (Villanueva-Russell, 2011), as osteopathy has done recently (Osteopathic International Alliance, 2013). The debates have centred on the deficit of evidence to explain the primary respiratory mechanism, its role as 'teaching metaphor', 'belief system', 'placebo' (Hartman, 2006a), its status as 'enigmatic' (Zegarra-Parodi and Cerritelli, 2016, p. 1) and an 'unfalsifiable belief' (McGrath, 2015, p. 136).…”