London Marathon 2000: The First Osteopathic Medical Team

On 16 April 2000, aged just 21 and midway through her osteopathic training in London, Dr Minha did something no one had done before. Under the auspices of the Osteopathic Sports Care Association (OSCA), for which she served as elected student representative, she helped bring the first osteopathic medical team to the London Marathon, one of the world’s great mass-participation races, and a proving ground for sports medicine.

It was not universally welcomed. A sharply worded letter arrived from the marathon’s then medical director, questioning what osteopaths were doing there at all, despite the fact that the team of students, senior students and tutors was working with special permission and under full supervision, and with the trust and backing of the late Jonathan Betser, who had founded OSCA in 1995 and would chair it for fifteen years. Being told off for an idea whose time had clearly come is, as Dr Minha has learned more than once, often the price of being first.

The door she pushed open did not close again. OSCA’s own history records the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester as the first major sporting event with osteopaths in the central medical team, and Betser, later osteopathic lead for the London 2012 Olympics, was posthumously honoured as OSCA’s first Fellow. Today, osteopathic support at major marathons is simply expected.

The team worked the route in T-shirts reading simply “Osteopathy in Sport”, and race day had its lighter moments too, including treating one fun-runner in a full fairy costume. A quarter of a century on, that first osteopathic team is a small but telling part of the story: the same instinct to bring a bypassed discipline to the people who need it, done with rigour and permission, runs straight through to the integrative model at Curaidh Clinic today, where osteopathy and manual therapy sit alongside conventional medicine as part of one toolkit.