Manual therapy

It is.

They learn what's called osteopathic manipulative treatment, or OMT.

The FAQ gives a great example of this, actually.

It says a DO might use OMT, which involves hands-on manipulation of muscles, joints, and fascia to relieve muscle spasms associated with chronic back pain.

or to improve lymphatic circulation after surgery.

Right.

And it isn't a replacement for medication or surgery.

It's an additional highly trained tool in the physician's toolkit.

The truth is your nervous system does not care.

Let's be honest, I've had to do quite a bit of nervous system care, like acupuncture, OMT, which is a treatment that I get that's similar to chiropractic care.

I still have PTSD triggers that I deal with.

One of them recently was the soap at the hospital.

But I've had to do a lot of nervous system care.

And after my first, I had to do the same things.

I didn't have OMT because I didn't know about it at the time, but I still did extensive counseling for like a year, year and a half.

I did acupuncture care then, obviously getting out, taking my babies.

It's published in February 2026 in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine.

Essentially, they looked at acute neck and low back pain presentations, people presenting in the emergency department, and either randomized people into either receiving OMT or a single dose of oral ibuprofen.

They ended up with about 35 patients in the final analysis, 20 who received OMT, 15 who received their single dose of ibuprofen.

And they looked at pain, measured on a numeric rating scale, and then some other secondary outcomes, pain relief scale, patient satisfaction, adverse events.

And then they concluded that they found no significant difference between the OMT and dose of ibuprofen for patients with acute neck or low back pain with regards to any of their primary or secondary outcomes.

Gotcha.

So what made you want to bring this article to us this month? Like, is OMT in emergency rooms something that's commonly done?

To my knowledge, it's not.