Essays & Reflections

A young boy drew to pass the time. He was good at it, he found. He drew faces well, and the bodies too. He began to understand how they fit together. As the drawings improved, so did his confidence. It felt to him like there was some kind of order in the world. If he looked closely enough, he could copy a small piece of it onto the page.

With age, drawing was no longer enough. He felt restless. He shifted his interest to computers and began to program them. He set an interesting goal. He wanted to build a working simulation of billiards. He did not know physics yet so his father taught him the basic equations. They described how objects collide. How energy moves. How motion changes when force is added. He wrote the code line by line. He changed it again and again. He wanted the virtual world to behave like the real one.

The program ran, but it did not always behave the way he expected. Simple equations led to quirky results. Small changes led to big differences. Sometimes the movement made sense. Sometimes it did not. He assumed he had made mistakes, and he probably had. But it also felt like he was seeing something hidden. The order he thought was solid seemed more fragile than he had believed.

In school, he studied physics. It promised clear answers. That the world could be described. That motion, structure, and energy could be written in numbers. It felt clean in a way that drawing did not. So, his main interests conflicted. One was about expression. One was about rules. He did not know how to bring them together.

Then he learned about chaos theory. Simple rules birthed unpredictable behavior. Small changes multiplied into large effects in a metaphor called "the butterfly effect". An insignificant flap of the butterfly's wing, in one place, could become a storm on the other side of the world. This idea felt familiar to him. It reminded him of his old program. Chaos found its way into his art. He began to draw in different ways. Less realistic. More abstract. At the same time, his physics moved away from clean systems and toward disorder.

He learned many things. But he still did not feel settled.

Then, he discovered Osteopathic philosophy.

And that is where the story quietly takes a turn and becomes my story. For the first time, it felt like all of these interests came together in one place. Though my directions of interest had shifted in a somewhat roundabout way, in retrospect I realize that I had been circling the same question all along from different directions: how does order persist in a world that is always trying to dissolve it?

Osteopathy gave me a way to think about that question inside a living system. Structure, force, perception, circulation, and adaptation could exist together without contradiction. What I had been sketching in art and modeling in code and studying in equations was now visible in the human body as something alive that constantly adjusts under the loads of stress placed upon it.

In biology, health is not a fixed state. It is not something you simply have. Health is a process that is constantly in flux. Every second, the body is correcting errors, adapting to stresses, reallocating its resources, and spending energy to resist disorder. Even at rest, that system is working. In injury and illness, that work becomes visible and highlighted.

The body has to rebuild itself. Nerves, blood vessels, and muscles have to change to accommodate what is new. Some muscles will atrophy. Some will hypertrophy. On top of this, the brain rewrites its internal maps of all of these structures. In this context, pain often comes not only from the original physical damage, but also from the extreme effort of the system trying to stay organized under strain. Layered over this is the emotional set of consequences of the entire process and how the injured person must now interact with both their body and the world around them.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I write this webpage. Something that comes to mind is a dried, dead flower I saw the other day. Visibly, it is brittle. It is finished. But what it actually represents is the endpoint of a long coordinated project. Water transport. Cellular construction. Seasonal growth. A constant striving toward light.

The remaining husk is meaningful, not despite its death, but because of the length and the intelligence of what came before it and created it.

Human bodies are the same. Their death is not the failure of a system. It is the moment when the energetic cost of maintaining that original order finally outweighs what the system can provide. There is dignity in the attempt to hold the system in order.

In Osteopathic philosophy and rehabilitation, this framework matters. We are not here to restore people to some idealized version of what they once were. We are here to help living systems, people, reorganize under new constraints. Recovery is not a return to the past. Recovery is not erasure. It is the search for a new kind of coherence and balance for a system that is constantly changing.

In physics terms, it is the attempt of a body to return from a turbulent state to a stable one. Health is not perfection. Health is how long and how intelligently a system can resist falling out of order and how well it can find new stable states that reflect the new reality of the body.

One of the quiet gifts Osteopathic medicine gave me was permission to abandon linear thinking.

Pain is rarely just mechanical.
Emotion is rarely just psychological.
Healing is almost never one-directional.

The nervous system does not respect neat boundaries between thought and tissue, memory and muscle tone, fear and inflammation. These relationships are nonlinear. Small emotional shifts can produce large physical changes. Large injuries can lie quiet for years and then reappear through surprising pathways. The system does not behave like a chain of dominoes. It behaves like a web.

Emotion is not symbolic in the body. It is regulatory. Anger changes breathing. Grief changes posture. Fear reshapes motor control. Love is one of the most powerful modulators of pain I know. These are not poetic statements. They are things you can see. Over time, those emotional states also reshape blood flow, digestion, sleep, and attention in ways that are measurable, not imaginary.

But the system does not stop at the skin.

Every patient lives inside larger human systems: family, history, loss, expectation, devotion, grief. Many people also orient themselves toward something greater than themselves: God, nature, ancestry, duty, purpose. These forces shape nervous systems just as surely as tissue injury does.

From an Osteopathic perspective, none of this is external to health. The body, mind, and environment are not stacked layers. They are a single interwoven system.

Modern medicine is excellent at isolating variables, and that power saves lives. But isolation can also hide the larger field in which healing actually occurs. Structure and function are inseparable across scales: cellular, emotional, relational, and meaningful.

When I treat patients, I am always aware that I am never working on a structure in isolation. My work is kind of like a sandwich. I am working on a living system inside a life instead of another living system.

I want to be clear about something that matters to me. These conclusions do not belong to any one profession or degree.

You do not have to be an osteopath to think this way.
You do not have to be a physiatrist to practice with this lens.

I have met surgeons, internists, nurses, therapists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who arrive at similar truths using entirely different language. Most clinicians I know who are both effective and genuinely content eventually converge on similar understandings. Bodies are complex. Outcomes are nonlinear. Meaning matters.

As an optimist, I believe this happens naturally when people stay close enough to real patients and real outcomes for long enough.

At the same time, I think modern clinical environments often pull people away from these realizations. Reimbursement pressure. Financial anxiety. Productivity targets. The quiet pull of status and external definitions of success. None of these are evil. They are understandable. But they reshape attention.

There is also a structural problem when clinicians become insulated from their own long-term outcomes. A surgeon who never sees follow-up. A provider who does not witness complications. A system where consequences are filtered through others. In those settings, it becomes very hard to learn from failure in the deepest sense.

Many clinicians eventually discover that income does not protect against burnout. Status does not guarantee fulfillment. Titles do not satisfy the deeper hunger for meaning.

When medicine becomes primarily about revenue or reputation, it may still function efficiently, but it often becomes existentially thin. The work can look impressive from the outside and feel strangely empty from the inside.

I remain hopeful that most clinicians, given enough time and honest exposure to outcomes, drift back toward a deeper balance. Relationship over performance. Coherence over conquest. Stewardship over spectacle. Not because it is fashionable, but because it is sustainable.

I do not think fulfillment in medicine comes from winning against disease. I think it comes from participating honestly in the long nonlinear story of adaptation, recovery, limitation, and sometimes loss, and knowing that you remained present for it.