How many osteopathy sessions do you actually need?
The question I am asked most, and the honest answer: two or three sessions are enough to know whether osteopathy helps you.
This is the question that comes up most. It arrives at the end of a first session, with a little apprehension in the voice.
My answer fits in one sentence: two or three sessions are enough to know whether osteopathy helps you.
Why two or three
For a recent, uncomplicated problem, a body that is going to respond to manual work responds quickly. You feel it within days. Not months.
If after two or three sessions the situation has not clearly moved, it does not mean ten are needed. It means the answer lies elsewhere, and I will say so. Sending you back to your doctor is part of my job, exactly like the rest of it.
The 48 hours afterwards
It is common to feel achy, a little tired, or slightly more sensitive in the two days after a session. That is frequent and not serious: the body is reorganising how it loads itself, and that takes some energy.
What I suggest over those two days: drink normally, move gently, skip the hard training session planned for tomorrow. The body needs to integrate, not to be tested.
If anything worries you, write to me rather than wait.
Pain that has been there for years
Here the scale changes, and it deserves plain speaking. A strain present for ten years does not undo itself in an hour. The body has organised around it, and that organisation has its own logic.
In those situations I would rather talk about support over time, with sessions spaced out, and above all about goals we agree on together. Regaining comfort through the day is not the same thing as making a pain disappear, and I prefer that we agree on what we are aiming at.
Maintenance, yes, but not automatically
Some people come twice a year without any particular complaint, because it suits them. That is perfectly fine.
But I do not schedule a series of appointments in advance, and I do not consider regular follow-up necessary for everyone. Osteopathy rests on a return to health, not on a subscription.
What matters more than the number of sessions
What you do between them. Moving every forty minutes when you work sitting down, changing how you load one side, resuming activity gradually.
A session that changes nothing about your habits will not hold, however many times you come back. That is why I always finish with specific advice, and why I ask at the next session whether you followed it.