I want to start this adventure by saying that this blog will be a shared effort between two very dear friends.  Marc and I met in 2012 at the Canadian Academy of Osteopathy in Hamilton, where we had both enrolled in a 4-year private college to become Osteopathic Manual Practitioners.  (Osteo - what now?  I’m going to come back to that.)  We had both come from other places for the program and had decided to live in nearby Toronto and commute to school for the whole 4 years.  It turned out that we lived about 3 blocks apart and we ended up carpooling for the sometimes 45 minutes, sometimes 3 hours (I hate Toronto traffic), drive to-and-from Hamilton each day for school.     

Over those 4 years Marc and I spent countless hours in a car or a classroom together.  We have seen each other in every possible mood and through all the ups-and-downs of life happening as we worked our way towards our degrees.  In 2014 we opened a student practice together at the Village Healing Center in the west end of Toronto.  When we started, we rented a single room from a massage therapist for half a day each because we had no patients and no idea what we were doing.  We would go to the Center together and hang out in the empty room doing homework and hoping someone would come by that needed our help.  By the time we graduated in 2016, we both had full and thriving Osteopathic Clinical practices.  We took on 3 full-time offices in the Center, brought 2 more Osteopaths to our team and had 2 students working part-time as well.  We worked our tails off to make that practice grow.  And it grew. 

On January 1st, 2020 we took on our next tag-team adventure as we opened our own private clinic at 168 Annette Street in “The Junction” neighbourhood of Toronto.  This new space will allow us to grow again, and already we’re realizing that it will be another opportunity for us to work our tails off.  We have taken on new team members, included other complimentary modalities that we believe are vital to holistic health, run our own clinical practices AND (most exciting of all) we have opened the only Walk-In Acute Care Osteopathic Clinic in Toronto.  This idea was a major driving force behind our move and something we have both wanted to do since starting our original practices in 2014.  This brings me back to Osteopathy and my career as an Osteopathic Manual Practitioner. 

That probably requires some explaining and is part of the reason we are starting this blog.  What is Osteopathy?  What is it for?  What is it not for?  And who needs it?  This will be an ongoing conversation that we will have over the next few weeks. Be sure to stay tuned each week for a new article!

Jill