Osteopathic practitioner´s considerations on infertility treatment : A qualitative study
Triay Salamanca, Silvia (2025)
2025
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025060621103
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025060621103
Tiivistelmä
The impact of infertility prevalence affects a large part of the world's population, as approximately 1 in 6 people experience infertility during their lifetime.
Osteopathy is a person-centred healthcare discipline that facilitates the body's innate ability to heal itself and promotes a holistic approach using manual treatments. The aim of this master´s thesis is to describe experienced osteopath´s considerations of infertility treatment observing and exploring the knowledge, the clinical reasoning, the approaches, and the techniques considered by osteopaths treating infertility.
Qualitative research methods with a phenomenological approach were used. Participants were recruited through purposeful and snowballing sampling. Inclusion criteria consisted of osteopaths having more than five years of experience treating people with infertility and speaking Spanish or English language. Data was collected from 10 participants through semi-structured in-dept interviews and was analysed by inductive content analysis, creating codes, themes, categories, and subcategories.
Four main themes were emerged from data. The osteopathic view of each attempt to conceive as a unique event, recognised through the patients' narrative, the therapeutic relationship and the osteopath's scope of practice. The identification of possible underlying causes, and restoration and optimisation of physiological functions. The osteopathic reasoning for underlying multifactorial infertility causes, such as inflammatory, thermoregulatory, circadian cycles, postural, organic, and structural factors. And the osteopathic intervention to identify and treat physiological disruptors, using an integrative and/or global approach, and manual skills, which included hand-based communication and types of techniques.
The tendency to delay motherhood and the high prevalence of infertility rates might require considering a broad spectrum of treatment options osteopaths have developed a general and specific overview and combined integrative, holistic, individualised and person-centred model with the effectiveness of osteopathic manual treatment. It may enable the design of a personalised treatment plan and to focus on specific manual interventions that could be highly relevant to the person's condition.
Osteopathy is a person-centred healthcare discipline that facilitates the body's innate ability to heal itself and promotes a holistic approach using manual treatments. The aim of this master´s thesis is to describe experienced osteopath´s considerations of infertility treatment observing and exploring the knowledge, the clinical reasoning, the approaches, and the techniques considered by osteopaths treating infertility.
Qualitative research methods with a phenomenological approach were used. Participants were recruited through purposeful and snowballing sampling. Inclusion criteria consisted of osteopaths having more than five years of experience treating people with infertility and speaking Spanish or English language. Data was collected from 10 participants through semi-structured in-dept interviews and was analysed by inductive content analysis, creating codes, themes, categories, and subcategories.
Four main themes were emerged from data. The osteopathic view of each attempt to conceive as a unique event, recognised through the patients' narrative, the therapeutic relationship and the osteopath's scope of practice. The identification of possible underlying causes, and restoration and optimisation of physiological functions. The osteopathic reasoning for underlying multifactorial infertility causes, such as inflammatory, thermoregulatory, circadian cycles, postural, organic, and structural factors. And the osteopathic intervention to identify and treat physiological disruptors, using an integrative and/or global approach, and manual skills, which included hand-based communication and types of techniques.
The tendency to delay motherhood and the high prevalence of infertility rates might require considering a broad spectrum of treatment options osteopaths have developed a general and specific overview and combined integrative, holistic, individualised and person-centred model with the effectiveness of osteopathic manual treatment. It may enable the design of a personalised treatment plan and to focus on specific manual interventions that could be highly relevant to the person's condition.