Why a DO: osteopathy and physiologic birth
When families hear that our practice is directed by a DO — a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine — some ask politely what the letters mean. The honest answer is that in 2026 a DO and an MD are functionally equivalent physicians: same licensing rigor, same residencies, same board certifications available to both, same prescription pad. Dr. Gomez trained and practices as an obstetrician-gynecologist by exactly the same standard as any MD colleague.
But the letters do carry a philosophy, and for this practice the philosophy is the point.
Osteopathic medicine was founded in the nineteenth century on a set of principles that sound, today, almost like a manifesto for physiologic birth: the body is a unit; structure and function are reciprocally related; the body possesses self-regulating, self-healing capacities; and the physician's task is to support those capacities — intervening decisively when they fail, and only then. A. T. Still built a medical tradition around trusting the organism while keeping the full toolkit within reach.
Now listen to the midwifery tradition at its best — Ina May Gaskin's central teaching that birth is a physiologic process that works, that fear impedes it, that the attendant's first job is to protect the conditions in which the body can do what it knows. These are the same idea, discovered from opposite ends of medicine.
What the osteopathic version adds is the standard of evidence and the depth of the toolkit. Trusting physiology is not the same as presuming it; the trust has to be earned pregnancy by pregnancy, verified at milestones, and bounded by criteria that say exactly when watchful support must become decisive intervention. A physician who has managed the hemorrhage and the crash cesarean knows precisely what she is trusting the body to avoid — which makes her trust worth something.
That is the sensibility this practice was built to offer: the farmhouse conviction that birth works, held to a physician's standard of proof. Ina May, with a DO. We mean it as a compliment in both directions.