Medway Osteopathic Clinic

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Medway Osteopathic Clinic Osteopathic Clinic for back pain relief, neck pain treatment, sport injuries, knee strains, hip pain

Gary Lutz founded this City Way clinic in 1988, and has been helping professions from builders, office workers to nurses and police officers stay pain free for over 2 decades

29/10/2026

Disempowerment is a nasty state of affairs, especially when it comes to your own health, your own mind and body.
YOU are in charge of you, not me, not your doctor or the NHS bureaucracy.
You do not have to wait 18 months for a second opinion, nor sit (if you can) in A and E for 24 hours for someone to say there is nothing wrong with you despite your pain.
Get empowered.
Get here.
01634 814700

26/10/2026

Life can be considered a chain of opportunities or a chain of micro and macro traumas, or a mixture of both depending whether you feel you benefited or suffered from the changes you had to make.
Health can be defined as the ability to cope with change and the changes needed by you so far shape your existing state.
This is why osteopathy isn't putting bits of you back in place but is an approach to easing your body away from those adaptations it has made that restricted the way you may adapt in future and an attempt to unwind those adaptations that clearly didn't help that gave you pain or loss of function.
You are an organism that functions and is very adaptable to your environment.
That means treatment relies both on us and you.
If it doesn't work we blame each other.
Generally if it doesn't work we need to see if we can do better.
In SHREK donkey was told "Ogres are like onions" - they have layers.
So too do injuries.
Fix something and something else often rears its ugly head.
Patients are allowed to have more tan one thing wrong with them

21/10/2026

If you smoke: stop.
If you are fat : slim

Simple advice but consider the numbers.
If someone smokes 20 a day from the age of 21 they have a 50:50 chance of living to 50.
1 in 2 will die by then of smoke related disease.
Survivors also have a 1 in 2 chance of dying from smoke related disease so of 1000 smokers 750 will eventually die of smoke related disease.
One common cause of death from smoking is heart disease and circulatory problems.
The formula from that is more encouraging: if you are 10 stone lose 1/2 a stone. If you are 15 stone lose a stone. If you are 20 stone lose 2 stone. Serious improvement in cardiovascular health, even after 50.
The old saying used to be "the skinny ones live longer". As long as they are healthy this is true.
As we age the weight threshold at which we become diabetic steadily drops so lose weight to avoid type 2 diabetes

15/10/2026

I was asked today if I was the osteopath with the Doctor Who stuff on my shelf.
That's me.
I've also been asked: am I the chap who has a son who works upstairs in his own clinic.
Yes, that's me too.
Also I'm Rupert's dad, Caroline's dad and so on.
It's amazing what people remember you for outside treatment :D

15/10/2026

There is a school of philosophy known as behaviorism. The underlying principle is you have only learned something when your behaviour changes. It contends that changes of mind don't matter, it's what you do that says what you are.
I often hear patients say they were fine for however long after treatment and then they reverted to having the problem that brought them to me in the first place.
When asked whether they changed their behaviour after treatment they say no.
A person is a product of their genes and their environment.
Unless your problem has been around for ever it's usually what you do that hurts you.
Between us we try to work out what that is.

The clinic number remains 016343 814700
Please don't text to ask for appointments, just ring.

14/10/2026

It's funny how our minds work:
First day in osteopathic college in 1983 I was introduced to a concept of how people hurt themselves.
You either accumulate lots of little injuries or have a larger accident or both.
Everyone knows of the flight or fight responses but there is also the third one: freeze.
When people hurt themselves some try to ignore it hoping it will get better, some rush for help and some freeze not knowing what they can do.
The Internet at this point is possibly not your friend as much of what you will find relating to what you think you have deals with the catastrophic.
Before digging a hole giving yourself a wrong diagnosis go see someone who has spent longer than 6 weeks on Google studying.
It doesn't make them right but they can apply filters to your information that you don't know and that online searches need you to know what to look for.
You don't know what you don't know.
A lovely trial in New Zealand using GP's 30 years ago proved we don't know what we think we do know either.
Tests showed they were better at things they thought they were bad at and proportionately worse at things they thought they were good at. They had studied hard to make up for their own weaknesses and neglected their supposed strengths.
We all do it, all those of us with human minds.
The clinic number remains 01634 814700

05/10/2026

The first rule of diagnosis is: "Blame the patient!"
After all, unless they are a victim of an accident their problem tends to come from what they do.
The first rule of treatment is: "Do no harm, by action or inaction!".

Patients often say they were better after treatment but the benefits didn't last.
Perhaps they went straight back to doing what caused their problem in the first place.
We rarely change our behaviour when someone relieves us of the consequences.
This can be very frustrating for all parties:
"I've been to 4 different osteopaths (physios, doctors, chiropractors, whoever) and none of them did any more than relieve it for more than a couple of days!"
"Did you do the exercises prescribed or take the medicines? Did you change you behaviour in any way?"
"No."
Blame the patient!
I'm often to blame because I do not book people back immediately and ask them to use their judgement about their problem.
Or I just fix them :D

05/10/2026

There are no more slots available for the sleep trial. Some people who responded just wanted cheap treatments :)

01/10/2026

Living tissue has rhythm.
A person has many rhythms, of body and of life and lifestyle.
All matter has movement, down to the essential vibrations of atoms.
Body function, physiology, is profoundly more complex than anyone's ability to really know but we work as though our approximations are real.
Any model is as good as the length of time it allows work to reliably take place.
Early osteopaths placed a lot of emphasis on body rhythm being useful, if not essential in maintaining and recovering health.
They did not possess the machines that have allowed us to view and measure so much more of body functions and yet those early conclusions from models lacking our more extensive data still hold true: rhythm is important.
Regular pulse and breathing rates are obviously tied to health but tissue tone is also rhythmic.
Reflexes go through cycles of stimulation and relaxation and constant stimulus, while being essential to life also needs pause to recover.
Hypertonic tight muscle has to relax before it can contract again usefully and a muscle is at its strongest when its fibers are at their longest.
All contraction of muscle aims to either create heat or to apply load to ultimately a bone (the heart is a special case, as are all muscles of viscera but hydraulics in the body is a bigger conversation)>
These loads onto bone are redirected through joints and much of my work is spent freeing these joints up so the central nervous system can easily re coordinate their actions.

Sleep is a rhythm of recovery.
I'd like to propose a little test/ trial/ experiment.
Instead of my usual fee of £60 per treatment I'm offering six sessions at £40 for treatment solely addressing rhythm in the body - no cracking - for people who will commit to going to bed one hour earlier than usual for them for six weeks.
I'd like them to keep a six week sleep diary for themselves and chart how they feel on a scale of one to ten - a wellness chart - every week to see how improving rhythm and extra sleep improves their lives.

I can only fit in about 10 people a week for this but I don't need 10 before I start with each individual so if anybody wants to try this out ring me: 01634 814700

30/09/2026

The 1993 Osteopaths Act that set up the statutory requirements for osteopathy as a regulated healthcare profession defined an osteopath as:
"One who does osteopathy"
while osteopathy was defined as:
"That which is done by osteopaths"

This circular reasoning was in recognition that the limits of the osteopathic viewpoint, the health paradigm of osteopathy, had not been reached and so could not be defined.

To be legally practicing we had to be acknowledged by our regulator and placed on a register, beyond that it was up to us to practice in a way that may be explained to a jury of our peers :)

Limits were placed by insurers in what they were happy to cover us for and by the Advertising Standards Agency for what we were allowed to claim to be able to do.

The problem with this is, of course, that insurers didn't know what osteopaths could do and the ASA would allow us to advertise what ALL osteopaths could do, so specialists were unable to claim anything they had spent years getting better at than anyone else.

It amuses me that we seem to be able to only treat simple musculo skeletal problems - "you treat bones don't you 'cause it says osteo in the name".

My graduating thesis was based on carrying out a crossover trial of patients with asthma but I can't claim any treatment capability :D

Address

36 City Way
Rochester
ME12AB

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 9pm
Tuesday 9am - 9pm
Wednesday 9am - 9pm
Thursday 9am - 9pm
Friday 9am - 9pm
Saturday 9am - 1pm

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