Hans de Jong

Physiotherapist, manual therapist and osteopath

Hans de Jong is a physiotherapist, manual therapist and osteopath with over 35 years of clinical practice and more than 150,000 patient treatments. He is the founder of the MyO-Concept and the FOI® (Functional Osteopathy and Integration) — two treatment concepts that approach the musculoskeletal system as a dynamic, indivisible whole, and which have now been adopted by approximately 5,000 trained therapists across Europe.

After completing his physiotherapy degree in Deventer, the Netherlands (1979–1983), Hans pursued a broad and internationally oriented training in manual medicine: manual therapy according to Marsmann, the Cyriax course in Brussels, the DGMM programme in Germany, orthomanipulation according to Sickesz, and several osteopathic training programmes. In 1988 he opened his own practice. It was there — in the treatment room, not in the textbooks — that his thinking took its definitive shape. The patient was his most important teacher.

His central clinical observation, which he was able to substantiate with increasing consistency throughout the 1980s and 1990s, is that the location of pain is almost never the location of its cause. The body responds to every trauma, illness and psychological load with systematic compensation patterns. An ankle sprain that does not fully resolve can propagate through the tibio-fibular joint and the knee into the pelvis, building a compensation chain that may manifest years later as headaches, gastric complaints or shoulder pain. Once you learn to read that pattern, you no longer need to chase the symptom.

From these insights, Hans developed the FOI® — a holistic treatment concept grounded in the functional model of Van der Bijl, the tensegrity principles of the fascial system, the viscero-somatic reflex arc from classical osteopathy, and haptonomy. The FOI® became the foundation of his teaching work in the 1990s. After 25 years of training therapists and continually refining his clinical insights, Hans integrated the FOI® into the MyO-Concept: a systematic and holistic treatment model that combines manual therapy, osteopathy, fascial treatment and haptonomy into a single, workable framework.

The MyO-Concept works with ten so-called Systematic Compensations (SCs) — eight in the spine, two in the periphery — which allow the clinician to map the compensation chain from cause to consequence quickly and reproducibly. The treatment techniques are gentle and pain-free: they work through rhythmic oscillations within the tone threshold of the connective tissue, giving the body the space to self-correct through neurophysiological processes. Postural correction is not force — it is an invitation.

Hans has been teaching his concepts for over thirty years. His courses are known for their direct clinical translation: every day of theory is followed by extensive practical training, so that participants can apply what they have learned the very next working day. Courses are held in Amsterdam and taught in Dutch.