Andrew Taylor still and the Mayo brothers: Convergence and collaboration in 21st-century osteopathic practice

Two visionary models of Healthcare founded on similar principles and honoring the primacy of the patient emerged from late 19th-century American frontier medicine. Their approaches differed, however. While the Mayo Model of Care emphasized a team approach to solving "a problem," Dr Still's model of osteopathy took an integrative approach attuned to the specific needs of the body's various systems. The author suggests that it is time to innovatively renew Dr Still's original model of patient care by incorporating some of the time-tested and popular features of the Mayo Model of Care. The author further discusses the advantage osteopathic physicians have over their allopathic counterparts as medical care moves from an organ-specific model to a cellular, molecular, and genetic model-adding that there is a potential for even greater possibilities for osteopathic medicine when osteopathic principles are applied to larger societal problems.