Osteopathy for kids with special needs

Annie Philip

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Volunteers of the Etudiants Osteopathes du Monde (EOM) at a workshop at Satya Special School in Puducherry.— Photo: S.S. Kumar

World Osteopath Students Association holds workshop

Among issues faced by Children with Special Needs is that of restricted mobility and difficulty in digestion. At a five-day workshop at Satya Special School in Puducherry, volunteers from the Etudiants Ostéopathes du Monde (EOM) or the World Osteopath Students Association in France demonstrated how osteopathy, a medical field which is still fairly new in India, can help deal with such ailments.

The EOM consists of current and former students from the Institut Supérieur d’Ostéopathie Paris (ISO Paris) and promotes osteopathy especially in countries where there is little access to it through yearly projects. The association raises funds for the projects through activities and by conducting treatments in France. In the past, the association has worked in countries such as Senegal and Morocco.

The team, consisting of seven osteopaths and one photographer from EOM, has been spending around three weeks in Puducherry and was at the Satya Special School last week.

According to the Medical News Today website, “osteopathy is a form of drug-free non-invasive manual medicine that focuses on total body health by treating and strengthening the musculoskeletal framework, which includes the joints, muscles and spine.

Its aim is to positively affect the body’s nervous, circulatory and lymphatic systems.”

Osteopathy works on the principle of interconnectedness of organs, tissues and other parts of the body, according to Gabriel Plessier, one of the team members from EOM.

“We work alongside physiotherapists. Osteopathy helps the body be better prepared to receive physical therapy. Children with Special Needs can develop locking of joints and abnormal motility patterns in the small intestine leading to issues with digestion. Osteopathy treats every tissue in the body so it can move at its best capability. Almost half of all osteopaths in France are physiotherapists,” he added.

“Children with Special Needs have a physical expression of stress. When the pericardium tissue around the heart is irritated, it leads to a ripple effect for these children, affecting other body parts. In osteopathy, the child is made to relax. Osteopathy also helps relieve facial tightness and postural dysfunction,” said Mr. Plessier.

About osteopaths, Mr. Plessier said, “While we cannot prescribe drugs or undertake surgery, we work with our hands and our sense of touch. We study about every element of the body and its interaction.”

Role of parents

Parents were also present during the workshop to help the osteopaths while treating the children. As the children trust their parents, it is better to involve them in the treatment, said Mr. Plessier. The parents were taught simple exercises and massages to aid mobility which they could use at home with their children. Students of physiotherapy from Sri Venkateshwaraa Medical College Hospital and Research Centre who are doing their internship at Satya Special School also got a chance to learn more about osteopathy.

Chitra Shah, director, Satya Special School, said, “We need to concentrate more on therapeutic intervention for Children with Special Needs. There is a huge gap between surgical intervention and therapeutic intervention in paediatric care. Osteopathy is looking at the issues these children face from a holistic point of view. We want to incorporate fields like osteopathy treatment in our school curriculum.”

The Satya Special School is also exploring if tele-therapy can be introduced, and possible tie-ups with colleges abroad to keep up with the latest trends in care for Children with Special Needs and special education.

“While we cannot prescribe drugs or undertake surgery, we work with our hands and our sense of touch”

Smartphone game helps reduce schizophrenia symptoms

IANS | Aug 10, 2015, 06.32 PM IST

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Smartphone game helps reduce schizophrenia symptoms (Getty Image)

Researchers at Cambridge University have developed a smartphone game that can help reduce symptoms of schizophrenia.

The game, called Wizard, helps those diagnosed with schizophrenia practice day-to-day cognitive skills that keep their brains sharp.

It has been designed to help deal with symptoms such as paranoia and hallucinations, and has been paired with the popular brain-training app, Peak.

"In conjunction with medication and current psychological therapies, (Wizard) could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness in their everyday life," The Guardian quoted a research team member as saying.

The study found that 22 patients who played the memory game committed fewer errors and needed less effort to remember the location of different patterns of specific tests.

Improvements in memory retention, remembering dates and times and understanding the context, conversation and other forms of communication are all categories that improved when patients used the game on a regular basis.

Wizard is currently available for iOS platform only, and soon it would be available for Android.

The study was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Gene drive': Scientists sound alarm over supercharged GM organisms which could spread in the wild and cause environmental disasters

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.
However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.

There is no compelling evidence to suggest that genetically modified crops are any more harmful than conventionally grown food (Getty)
“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
A group of senior geneticists have called for international safeguards to apply to researchers who want to develop gene drives, with strict security measures placed on laboratories to prevent the accidental escape of “supercharged” GM organisms that are able to spread rapidly in the wild.
Last week the US National Academy of Sciences initiated a wide-ranging review of gene-drive technology in “non-human organisms” and in this week’s journal Science a group of 27 leading geneticists call on the scientific community to be open and transparent about both the risks and benefits of gene drives.

Science News in Pictures

“They have tremendous potential to address global problems in health, agriculture and conservation but their capacity to alter wild populations outside the laboratory demands caution,” the scientists say.
The researchers have drawn up a minimum set of safety rules to protect against laboratory escapes and have called for a public debate on the potential benefits as well as risks of a technology that allows geneticists to rapidly accelerate the inheritance of GM traits throughout an animal population within just a few generations.
Researchers have likened gene-drive technology to a nuclear chain reaction because it allows GM genes to be amplified within a breeding population of insects or other animals without any further intervention once the trait has been initially introduced. This is the case even if the trait is non-beneficial to the organism.
Laboratory experiments on fruit flies have shown that a modified gene introduced into one individual fly can take just a few generations to “infect” practically every other fly in the breeding population, in defiance of the normal rules of genetics which dictate a far slower spread.

Kevin Esvelt, a gene-drive expert at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said the technology was developed theoretically about 10 years ago but it has only been made possible in the lab in the past two years with the discovery of the sophisticated gene-editing tool Crispr/Cas9.
Dr Esvelt explained that gene drives relied on a “cassette” of genetic elements that allowed a genetically modified gene to jump from one chromosome to another within the same individual so that eventually all of the sperm or eggs of the animal carried the GM trait, rather than half. This means that virtually none of the offspring is eventually free of an introduced GM trait.
Gene drives could benefit human health by altering insect populations that spread human diseases, such as mosquitoes that transmit malaria, dengue, chikungunya and Lyme disease, so that they were no longer a threat, he said.

Debate still rages over genetically modified food after nearly 20 years (Getty)

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Osteopathy for kids with special needs

World Osteopath Students Association holds workshop

Smartphone game helps reduce schizophrenia symptoms

Gene drive': Scientists sound alarm over supercharged GM organisms which could spread in the wild and cause environmental disasters

The development of so-called 'gene drive' technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture