Healing Touch

At NYCOM, the future of osteopathic medicine is in good hands.

By David McKay Wilson

When Wolfgang Gilliar, D.O., performs a physical exam, he does so with an eye on the patient's body alignment, an ear for his medical history, and a feel for the patient's body tissue, muscles, and ligaments.

"There's an art to palpation," says Gilliar one morning as he examines a medical student complaining of a stiff neck at NYCOM of NYIT's Academic Health Care Center on the Old Westbury campus. "The hands are an important tool to see and listen to the patient that you can otherwise not get by listening to the history. I read the tissue, and the tissue talks to me."

For Gilliar, a doctor of osteopathic medicine and chair of NYCOM's Department of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine (OMM), diagnosing and treating patients through touch is part of the holistic medical model taught at NYCOM, established as part of NYIT 31 years ago.

Back then, osteopathic medicine was struggling for acceptance in the healthcare field. M.D.s, or allopathic physicians, often looked down upon the practice, even though D.O.s were then, as they are now, fully licensed physicians trained in all specialties of medicine, and able to prescribe medication as well as perform surgery. Still, they were not taken seriously in the medical world. When NYCOM's first class of 34 physicians graduated in 1981, they struggled to find placements for internships and residencies, and later, to secure posts as attending physicians at hospitals in the metropolitan region.

One of the college's founders, Stanley Schiowitz, D.O., says that osteopathic doctors at the time joked that the only way they'd get into North Shore University Hospital in nearby Manhasset, N.Y., was to come in by ambulance and be admitted as a patient.

"It was really hard to get staff privileges anywhere," says Schiowitz, NYCOM's dean emeritus. "We laugh about it now. I tell these stories to students, and they can't believe it."

Three decades later, NYCOM graduates are welcomed as medical residents at top hospitals on Long Island's North Shore and throughout the country. Osteopathic medicine has found a firm foothold in the U.S. medical field, helped in part by NYCOM's emergence as the nation's leading training ground for D.O.s. With about 1,200 students, the college is now the largest of the nation's 25 medical schools that train doctors of osteopathic medicine. In 2007, NYCOM graduated 294 osteopathic doctors, representing 10 percent of all D.O. graduates in the United States last year. Among the 150 medical schools in the country, the college has grown to become the nation's third largest on a single campus and the largest among New York's 14 medical schools.

The surge in osteopathic medicine can be better understood with a quick glance at the college's 31-year history. When NYCOM was founded on NYIT's Old Westbury campus in 1977, there were about 15,000 D.O.s in the United States. Today, there are 61,000, representing about 7 percent of the nation's physicians. By 2020, the American Osteopathic Association estimates there will be at least 100,000 D.O.s practicing in the United States, helping to treat a Baby Boomer generation that is living longer and will be in need of medical care.

That growth is expected to help fill the projected physician shortage of between 80,000 and 200,000 physicians by 2020, according to recent studies. Osteopathic doctors will play a crucial role in the coming years because many of them--now about 65 percent of graduates--become primary care physicians, often practicing in rural or urban settings where the demand for such service is the greatest.