psychiatry and OMM

[MadPuppy2005]

I'm a osteopathic student. Can people do both psych and OMM, I know that you don't need to be board certified in OMM to do it. Many DO family docs do it just because they are proficient at OMM. Let's say I want to by a psychiatrist and see psychiatric patients 3 days a week and than spend 2 days doing OMM(not on the psych pt) at maybe an office with other family docs. I hate to not use OMM since I've gotten very good at it and I love it, yet I really like psych too. I thought about doing the 3yr oMM residency but I don't think I can do OMM daily for the next 50yrs, OMM can be very tiring and physically demanding. I'd love to do it part time.

I know I can do OMM, the main question is would insurance companies pay for any DO to do OMM or do you have to be a family doc, Internist, to do it? Would insurance companies say we will not reimburst you for OMM because you are a psych???


Also, I know psychiatrist can do pain fellowships, but has any one psychiatrist actually done a pain fellowship. I heard that most places will not consider psychiatrists for their pain fellowships.

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[GoodFriend]

BTW What is OMM?

I am an IMG who still learn the common abreviations.

Thanks,

GoodFriend

 

[andrea]

Hey there! I'm at KCOM - maybe I can help a little. GoodFriend, OMM stands for osteopathic manipulative medicine, which is musculoskeletal manipulation that osteopathic students learn.

MadPuppy, any DO regardless of specialty can bill for OMM. Our entire class is learning the ICD - 9 codes right now, in fact. I asked a psychiatrist who teaches here about this, and he said that he doesn't do OMM on patients so as to not damage the patient - doctor relationship, especially if they are survivors of sexual or physical abuse.

So you have a great idea, but it might be kind of tricky to do both psych and OMM. For example, what if your crazy psych patient made an appointment at your OMM clinic? Maybe I'm just thinknig too hard, though.

On the other hand, the director of our psych dept, Dr. Lovy, just gave a presentation about OMM and emotional release. He described how when doing manipulations, sometimes the patient will start crying uncontrollably, or have some other emotional response. He said that often this can be connected to something that happened to them as kids. For example, one guy had numerous chronic tender points in the abdomen, and Dr. Lovy started fixing them when the guy went nuts. Turned out the guy used to get hit in the stomach by gang members when he was a kid. That seemed to be a good starting point for therapy!

So I guess there's a way to do both well.... any thoughts?

 

[raspberry swirl]

madpuppy, i am also interested in psych, but would like to find a way to use my omm skills as well. I was told that you are absolutely NOT allowed to perform OMM on your OWN patients (it violates the psychiatrist-patient relationship). There are techniques that may or may not be beneficial to psychiatric patients (many people are skeptical about this, but our director of OMM believes there are a handful of techniques that are extremely helpful). you would have to find a DO attending or another on site DO to perform those techniques, or refer your patients to someone, if you were in a private practice setting.

However, you can definitely still perform OMM. you can do techniques on a colleague's psych patients or, as you said, through another type of specialty altogether. i am planning on doing maybe one day a week of OMM through someone else's practice. for example, my boyfriend is interested in physical med and rehab, and we thought it would be cool if, for example, one day a week i could come in and help out with OMM : ) hope this helps!

 

[raspberry swirl]

. . . and andrea is right, you can bill for, and get reimbursed, for OMM regardless of your specialty! (as long as you have a degree/certification) : )

 

[PublicHealth]

http://www.upledger.com/therapies/cst.htm