Osteopathy and Mental Health: An Embodied, Predictive, and Interoceptive Framework

Hello and welcome everyone to the Active Inference Lab. Today it is January 10th, 2022 and we're here in ActInf guest stream number 14 with a whole host of awesome guests. We're going to be discussing osteopathy and mental health and we're going to have the authors say hello and introduce themselves. Then Lucas will give a presentation and during the presentation, please feel free to add your comments and questions in the live chat. And then we'll have a bunch of time after the presentation to ask those questions to the authors, hear any authors remarks. So really excited to hear from you all and learn from your perspective. Let's hear the introductions from the authors and then go to Lucas. So please Robert, and then we'll kick it off from there. Thank you. Yeah, Robert Shaw. I'm based in Sweden. I'm an osteopath and a psychotherapist. My research interest is particularly with embodiment. And that was what my PhD was on, embodiment within the therapeutic relationship. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi everyone. I'm Francesco Ceritali from Italy. I'm a neuroscientist and an osteopath. Mainly interest in discovering how the brain works in relation to touch, in relation to the effect of touch, based on the different type of stimuli that the body receives. Hi, I'm George Estavils. I'm an osteopath. I'm currently based in Malta and Italy. I'm also a cognitive scientist and my main interest is on predictive processing, active inference, touch and chronic pain in general. And I'm currently working part-time at the osteopathic research Institute and I'm working there in education and research. And I'm also part-time studying psychology and science at mental health, mental health at King's college in London. And I think I can kick off the presentation now if that's okay with you, Daniel. Perfect. Thanks. So, yeah, we have the opportunity. Thanks again for the active inference lab for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here. We have the opportunity to present a paper that we have recently published in Frontiers in the section of psychology, the research topic called an activism and active appearance in the therapeutic alliance. And the paper is entitled osteopathy and mental health and embodied predictive and interoceptive framework. And yeah, without further ado, I think let's, let's dive right into it. A little introduction on why these things might be interesting. We have globally a very high prevalence and burden, but also comorbidity between muscle skeletal and mental health disorders. So to put this in perspective, about 1 billion prevalent cases of mental disorders have been reported in 2017, while about 1.3 billion prevalent cases have been reported of muscle skeletal disorders in 2017. So together these two broad spectrum of disorders are very prevalent, but also burdensome. So together both, both conditions contribute to, are the main contributors to work by disability. So, for example, the most skeletal mental disorders are also highly comorbid, which means for example, that anxiety, depression are frequently co-accord with chronic and often muscle skeletal pain conditions and vice versa. So, for example, depressive symptoms are quite prevalent in pain sufferers and pain symptoms are also quite prevalent in individuals with depression. So these, this data kind of outlines a need to, to integrate physical and mental health care services in our opinion, but also in the opinion of many research papers in the literature. So, especially multidisciplinary collaborations between muscle skeletal and psychological health care specialists have been called for. But on the other hand, there have also been some disease classifications that have been proposed to, to combine physical and mental health and proposed classifications that are neither purely somatic nor purely mental. So we believe that there is a need to integrate these kinds of approaches. And we like to propose osteopathy to be, to be one of these…