Hi there, I’m Kiefer. In 2025 I completed the 4 year Classical Osteopathic program at the Canadian Academy of Osteopathy, receiving the Diploma of Masters of Osteopathic Manual Sciences. My education was thorough, including over 4200 hours of curriculum, with over 1,500 hours of supervised hands-on experience treating the public in the school clinic.
I grew up on Vancouver Island, and thought I would spend my life as a career tree-planter on the West Coast of Canada, but chronic pain and injuries changed my route. A back injury that left me sleepless for a decade had me really considering my options. It was when I started getting regular osteopathic treatment that things began to change for me; I was able to sit in chairs again without constant readjustment, exercise, and get a good night’s sleep. Osteopathic treatment changed my life and gave me hope in my body’s capacity to heal itself with the right guidance. I would like to assist people in finding that hope.
I’m interested in working with any person who needs osteopathic treatment. I spent much of my life working labour jobs without benefits and understand that cost can be prohibitive to receiving care. If cost is a barrier, please reach out to me. I am a member of Osteopathy Canada and have a billing number that you can use if you do have insurance, and am currently situated in East Vancouver.
What is Osteopathy?
Osteopathy is a gentle, hands-on manual therapy that addresses the body as a dynamic unit of function. All parts are interrelated and treatment proceeds with the mentality that structure and function are reciprocal. Osteopathy believes that the body has inherent self-healing, self-regulating, and self-protective mechanisms, and our job is to encourage those by liberation of blood, nerve, and lymphatic pathways. With osteopathy, we seek to treat the cause, and not the effects, that the body presents with. The task of the Osteopathic Manual Practitioner is to manipulate the structure of the body to facilitate physiological change.
Principles-based osteopathy performs treatment through a contrasting diagnosis of what the soft tissue (muscles, fascia, ligaments) and the hard tissue (bones) are doing, performing an adjustment, and reassessing the body. It is a gentle approach that applies treatment with the body, not to it. The human body is always in a state of construction and deconstruction, and no two osteopathic treatments will look the same, as the body on the table is always different. Osteopathic treatment is applied with the principle of dosage in mind, which pertains to how much change has been introduced to the body, and not based on the time it takes to apply that treatment.
An Osteopathic Manual Practitioner must have a refined sense of palpation (feeling with the hands) to find asymmetry in the patient’s body, and then apply the necessary treatment to it. As A.T. Still, the founder of Osteopathy said, “To find health should be the object of the doctor. Anyone can find disease.”