Most practitioners who employ manual means of treatment will have experienced the phenomenon of palpating soft-tissues that appear to be more densely indurated, less pliable, than would be anticipated, relative to the age and physical status of the individual.In osteopathic medicine this experience is clustered, together with several other indicators, to suggest an area of what has been termed 'somatic dysfunction' (Rumney, 1979). Somatic dysfunction is defined as "impaired or altered function of related components of the somatic (body framework) system: skeletal, arthrodial, and myo-fascial structures, and related vascular, lymphatic, and neural elements." (Ward, 2003).The osteopathic model of somatic dysfunction, that attempts to make sense of such a finding, has been summarized by the acronym STAR (Dowling, 1998).
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