Osteopathy was devised in 1874 by Andrew Taylor Still. He trained as an engineer before receiving formal medical training at Kansas City School of Physicians and Surgeons, after which he worked as an army surgeon. He was unhappy with the often brutal medicine of his day, and he felt that stimulating the body's natural powers of self-healing would be preferable. He was interested in the body as a machine and became aware that many illnesses were the result of misalignment of the body's structures. Manipulation could restore the balance and cure illness, he believed.

Osteopathy is a manipulative therapy that works on the body's structure (the skeleton, muscles, ligaments, and connective tissue) to relieve pain, improve mobility, and restore all-round health. Osteopaths believe that we function as a complete working system - our body structure, organs, systems, mind, and emotions are all interrelated and mutually interdependent. Because of this, problems that affect one part of the structural body upset the balance of the body generally, and also the emotions. Similarly, internal problems can reveal themselves in the body's structure as it adapts to accommodate pain, discomfort, or disease.

In Britain over 5 million people a year visit an osteopath, many of them now referred by a doctor. In the United States, where osteopaths are also medically trained doctors, the figure is in excess of 100 million.