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Vail Valley Bizwatch: Vail Osteopathy helps you achieve full potential

Dr. Susan Lan practices traditional osteopathic manipulation, cranial and biodynamics with Vail Osteopathy.
Dr. Lan practices traditional osteopathic manipulation, cranial and biodynamics |

Business Name: Vail Osteopathy.

Location: Riverwalk Natural Health Clinic, 280 Main St., C-105, Edwards, across from Starbucks.

Date opened: August.



Owner: Susan Lan, D.O.

Contact information: Go to http://www.vail osteopathy.com. Call 970-306-1448 or email susanclan@gmail.com.

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What goods or services do you provide? Dr. Lan practices traditional osteopathic manipulation, cranial and biodynamics. Traditional osteopathy offers a “hands-on” diagnostic and therapeutic approach to achieving your body’s full potential.

What strategy do you use to differentiate your business from your competition? Doctors of osteopathic medicine practice side-by-side with their M.D. colleagues as family physicians, internists and specialists such as cardiologists, orthopedists and neurosurgeons. However, only osteopathic doctors receive additional training in osteopathic manipulative medicine and using the body’s mechanisms to heal. Osteopathic physicians are guided by these innate, subtle forces to diagnose and formulate each individual’s unique treatment plan. There are no predetermined protocols. Each person is evaluated and treated as an individual.

Osteopaths use information from your history, physical exam, your body’s natural rhythms and other forces that may be affecting you, along with an extensive knowledge of anatomy (structure) and physiology (function) and finely tuned palpatory skills, to diagnose and treat, allowing the fullest expression of your health to emerge.

What can your customers expect from you? Whether you’re recovering from an injury, have new symptoms, a new diagnosis or have “tried everything else,” traditional osteopathy can help. Initial visits are 90 minutes, and follow-up visits are 45 minutes to one hour. Treatment occurs while lying down on a treatment table and involves a gentle, hands-on approach to free areas of the body in which motion has become restricted. Some patients sense a gentle touch, while others feel their body change immediately.

Most patients relax during the whole visit, with a good percentage of them falling asleep as they are being treated. Your body continues to assimilate treatment, even days after being treated. Results depend upon many factors, including the body’s inherent vitality and severity and duration of the problem. Some will respond immediately and some will require a series of treatments. The focus of treatment is on regaining your body’s balance, removing barriers to the full expression of your health and providing the body with resources.

Tell us a little about your background, education and experience. Dr. Susan Lan is board certified in preventive medicine and public health. She graduated from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1999 and obtained a master’s degree in public health. She served in the U.S. Air Force in a family practice clinic at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and in the emergency department at Yokota Air Base, Japan. Dr. Lan currently serves as medical director of the Vail Valley Medical Center’s Comprehensive Occupational Medicine Program.

Dr. Lan was tired of seeing her patients’ issues and symptoms go unaddressed by the prevailing medical paradigm where medication, invasive procedures and surgery are the mainstay of treatment. She believes a new paradigm is required for true healing.

When modern medicine didn’t have an answer for her own neurologic symptoms, Dr. Lan turned to a specialty in her own profession: osteopathic manipulative medicine — specifically, cranial osteopathy and biodynamics. Along with major lifestyle changes, osteopathy has significantly improved her symptoms and functionality. Dr. Lan now specializes in this type of treatment.

What is the most humorous thing that has happened at your business since you opened? Sometimes this type of treatment can have surprising results. Even though we weren’t specifically working on intestinal issues, a client’s 10-year history of diarrhea resolved after one treatment. A not-so-humorous conversation topic!


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