Career Options
Taking the long road to osteopathySusan Spidalieri always expected she'd finish high school and move on to university and become a physiotherapist. A knee injury, however -- not hers, but that of a friend of her mother -- determined otherwise. DAVID CHILTON |
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 [ 2005-10-12 ] |
Susan Spidalieri's inquisitive nature has led her on a circuitous path to osteopathy.
Rather than consult a doctor or a physiotherapist about her knee, the friend went to see a registered massage therapist, sparking Spidalieri's interest in the profession.
"I looked at the two different scopes of practice and realized that massage actually has a wider scope of practice. It just clicked (with me) when I heard about it. I used to think that only physios could do massage until I realized this woman had her knee fixed by a massage therapist."
So massage won over physiotherapy and Spidalieri attended the Canadian College of Massage and Hydrotherapy in Sutton, Ont., (now relocated to Toronto) for two years full time, graduating in 1991.
She spent the next couple of years building her practice as a registered massage therapist before another ailment -- this time one of her own -- prompted Spidalieri to head for Sri Lanka in 1993 to study acupuncture. She headed to the South Asian island nation because, she says, a friend cured her tendinitis with acupuncture and she wanted to learn how it was done.
And Sri Lanka? Unless you were a doctor, she says, training in acupuncture in English wasn't available here or anywhere else.
So it was off to the Open International University of Alternative Medicine, just outside the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo for two months. "They took the program from Peking, China, and opened up the university in Sri Lanka, and they taught in English," Spidalieri says.
Following her two months in Sri Lanka she returned to Canada and resumed her practice in Brampton.
But it wasn't long before Spidalieri was on the move again -- this time to somewhere far less exotic than South Asia. She enrolled in the Canadian Academy of Osteopathy and Holistic Health Sciences in Hamilton, Ont., in 2001.
Her curiosity about osteopathy was piqued in Sri Lanka after talking to European osteopaths attending the course on acupuncture. "They had pointed out something on me that I had absolutely no idea that I was dealing with. It was one of my hips. We have a congenital hip disorder in our family. (One student) could see from the way one of my hips was moving that there was something wrong. So he treated me and after one treatment I felt different for about six months ."
The program at the Canadian Academy was based on a blend of European and American style osteopathy, says Spidalieri, who spent three years studying part-time in Hamilton. It was also geared towards people already working in health care, so Spidalieri and her fellow students didn't have to revert to the basics.
Osteopathy isn't well known in Canada, says Spidalieri, explaining what osteopaths do is use all of the body's systems to balance it, and so treat everything from ear infections to bad backs to heartburn.
Obviously, lots of Canadians like being treated by an osteopath, and Spidalieri says there's no shortage of clients for her at A Healing Place, the multi-disciplinary clinic in Brampton where she works, charging $65 for an initial consultation.
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