Rod-Therapy and Osteopathy, both are recent inventions and both deal with curing the ailments of the body, not by any medicine, or surgery, but by manipulation, though in slightly different ways.
We shall deal with them separately. Rod-therapy is an indigenous treatment, while Osteopathy had its origin in the U.S.A. Also while, in Rod-therapy, the rubbing of the body, its spine and other limbs, is done with rods, in Osteopathy, the same is done by the Osteopath by manipulating with his fingers.
Though Rod-therapy has successfully treated scores of patients suffering from chronic and serious diseases of the body, yet it has not established its due place in the medical science, mainly because it has remained confined to the initiative of a single individual, who has tirelessly been promoting it as a noble cause, without any financial help from the government or other sources.
Contrary to this, Osteopathy, though had been receiving step-motherly treatment from the medical science and had been in oblivion for several decades, received public attention and its place in medical science recently in the sixties, and developed so rapidly that within the past three decades it has travelled from America to Europe, where colleges have been established for its training and award of professional degrees.
Both these therapies, the Rod-therapy and the Osteopathy can rightly be called natural therapies and can have their right place in the science of Nature-cure. We first take up the study of the Rod-therapy.
THE SCIENCE OF THE ROD-THERAPY
Modern-age comforts—school-buses picking your wards at the door, scooters within the reach of every moderate home, Dunlop-pillows, sofas, coolers and even press-the-button fans have made us princes, sans their many-manly sports, as horse-riding, hunting, fishing etc.
To all these victims of such cosy comforts, body-aches, hypertension, overweight, sleeplessness, there comes a novel method of treatment—massage by the rod, or Rod-therapy. It is very much like the proverbial driving-out of the ghost by the rod in case of your ailments.
Some inventions have been the result of an accidental flash of thought; Newton getting at ‘his law of motion’ at the falling of an apple, Archimedes discovering the principle of specific gravity at the upward thrust of water, as he jumped into the water, etc.
The discovery of Rod-therapy, too, is contributed to no medical man, but a man from the Administrative service, whose ingenuity made him cure his own ailment after an accidental relief.