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Stop the Insanity!
I hope this gets everyone's attention, and I don't give a rip if anyone replies or not. I am posting this separately from the previous discussions on here that have deteriorated into the most vile insulting and mudslinging bunch of crap I have ever seen in my life.
It is distressing to me that massage therapists, researchers in the field, and anyone else associated with our profession in any way stoop to this kind of behavior. Not only is it not a productive discussion, it is starting to sound like a bunch of politicians on tv with their insulting of each other's credentials, standards, and abilities.
I am not interested in shame and blame, so who started it and who said what is irrelevant. I urge you all to remember that we are ALL in this profession because we have a desire to help people through the awesome power of touch, and that is what it is about.
We don't have to agree. We can all agree to disagree. The personal attacks, the character attacks, the arguing over which country does it better, is ridiculous, petty, and childish. This is not the first time this has happened. It is the main reason I avoid this site most of the time.
I am no better, or no worse than anyone else, and everybody is entitled to an opinion. That's what forums are meant for, so that people with differing opinions have a place to discuss those, but so much of what has gone on here is not a civil discussion. When I see people that I know to be hard-working, caring people, and people that I know to be brilliant minds and hard-working as well get into these mudslinging insulting arguments on here, I personally find that to be a bad reflection of what we are supposed to be about.
I don't have to be bad in order for you to be good. You don't have to be a failure just so someone else can be a success. One country who does things differently is not better or worse, they are just different. People get caught up in national pride, and that's okay, but it does not have to deteriorate into what some of these discussions have deteriorated into. Someone makes a comment, someone takes it the wrong way, or out of context, and it just goes downhill from there.
When you're writing like this, you can't hear people's tone of voice, you can't see their body language, and what might be civil if we were all in a room together comes off as a bunch of superior b*******, and one's just as guilty as the other. When anyone has anything intelligent to say, someone else seizes upon that and uses it as an excuse for the next round of arguing.
I wish everyone of you peace and prosperity, regardless of where you are from, what you do, or how you do it. We are all equal by virtue of the fact that we are all human and it's too bad that people are fighting like a pack of junkyard dogs instead of having a civil disagreement. I can't participate in it and I won't.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on
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:)
That is a very good response, Alexei--cheers!
The reason I don't agree is that we're not vending machines--something that works at the subatomic level does not translate in a 1:1 way to our level of perception, which in turn does not translate in a 1:1 way to populations or the universe.
Remember that quantum mechanics was not discovered because weird things were happening all around--it was discovered because the mathematical equations would not work out in any other way. In other words, everyday observation did not lead to QM; massive-pain-in-the-ass equations did.
Given that we can't extrapolate 1:1 from subatomic to our level of perception, there is a lot that remains to be done in connecting the dots from quantum entanglement to placebo--and that work has not yet been done.
Still, I gotta say, that was a very good response :).
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Permalink Reply by Alexei Levine on
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Thanks Ravensara, seriously, I agree that the placebo effect is probably not related, but we really don't know how it works. I think it's probably some kind of emergent phenomenon like consciousness may be also.
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Permalink Reply by Matthew D. Stewart on
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Cool, If you can conduct these experiments on your massage table then that would be great. And if you could, then call Standford, Oxford, Cambridge and the folks at CERN, they'd all like to know how you can do it without a Large Hadron Collider or other such equipment.
Alexei Levine said:What if energy work is a great way to take advantage of and utilize the placebo effect, which is a verifiable phenomenon. Also, quantum physics has been shown experimentally to violate the first law of thermodynamics http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5705317/quantum_entanglement_and_tele... , and although it hasn't been shown experimentally yet, experiments are being developed to test the popular hypothesis that it also violates the second law of thermodynamics http://books.google.com/books?id=-nWyk7jH5_EC&pg=PA135&lpg=... Certainly quantum entanglement ("spooky action at a distance" according to Einstein) would by definition violate the inverse square rule.
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Permalink Reply by Lee Edelberg on
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My characterization, RT, was an observation made of some of the people involved in this forum, nothing more.
I don't mind if you or someone else wants to adhere to those principals in your work. Go for it, and give the massage world info as it develops!What makes me uncomfortable is the attitude that it is a standard that we should all meet. In the contentious thread there were references to practitioners being considered unethical for endorsing reiki, copper pyramids, ionizing foot-baths. Someone said that it was hurting the image of our profession and it was the duty of therapists to do something to stop these things. There was also talk about a higher level of certification based solely on western scientific principals (my terminology).
I don't know where you stand on these more political issues, but my stance is pretty simple: live and let live. The older I get the more I see that absolutes become fewer and fewer, other than the old saw "death and taxes".
So, hopefully that is clear and maybe not even controversial! I enjoy the conversation, but not the negativity.
Best......Lee
Ravensara Travillian said:
thanks for taking back the "world view" thing.
but I've got to be honest, here, your characterization of what people who promote evidence-based practice think isn't much better.
From the horse's mouth (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2349778/pdf/bmj00524-00...):
Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. By individual clinical expertise we mean the proficiency and judgment that individual clinicians acquire through clinical experience and clinical practice. Increased expertise is reflected in many ways, but especially in more effective and efficient diagnosis and in the more thoughtful identification and compassionate use of individual patients' predicaments, rights, and preferences in making clinical decisions about their care. By best available external clinical evidence we mean clinically relevant research, often from the basic sciences of medicine, but especially from patient centred clinical research into the accuracy and precision of diagnostic tests (including the clinical examination), the power of prognostic markers, and the efficacy and safety of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive regimens. External clinical evidence both invalidates previously accepted diagnostic tests and treatments and replaces them with new ones that are more powerful, more accurate, more efficacious, and safer.
Good doctors use both individual clinical expertise and the best available external evidence, and neither alone is enough. Without clinical expertise, practice risks becoming tyrannised by evidence, for even excellent external evidence may be inapplicable to or inappropriate for an individual patient. Without current best evidence, practice risks becoming rapidly out of date, to the detriment of patients.--David L. Sackett, Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't--It's about integrating individual clinical expertise and the best external evidence. BMJ. 1996 January 13;312(7023):71-2.
I don't see anything simplistic or "do it my way" about that. If you want to complain about how an individual person fails to meet this target, that's one thing, but if you're going to say that most people who promote evidence based practice do this, then as a "people" who promotes evidence based practice, I say you're wrong on your description of us.
Tesla was brilliant, complex, and a very mixed bag. He invented lots of things that worked, he claimed to have worked out a complete theory of gravity that he would give to the world (but never did), he disagreed with Einstein over relativity, he claimed space-time cannot be curved, he had OCD and was obsessive about germs, and lots of other things. A messy, wonderful human being, in other words. Just because he's right about some things doesn't make him right about all his fanciful claims later in life.
I don't know whether the cold fusion guys were actually conscious frauds, or whether they were just too in love with their hypothesis, and published it far too recklessly soon. Either way, it doesn't matter for the end users; they're not getting those results, whether it was fraud or error.
My point is that you have to have some way of evaluating whether a claim is likely to be true or not. And Newtonian physics is certainly not the whole story by any means, and I never claimed it was. Yet it is reliable enough to keep planes in the sky, and patients defibrillated, so as imperfect and incomplete as it is, we can get a lot of mileage out of it.
When someone is claiming to have already transcended those laws (which we are using a a guideline to distinguish what is likely to be possible from what is likely to be impossible), why should we wait a "few more generations" for them to prove their claim? Either they are doing what they say they are now, or they are not.
Lee Edelberg said:"world view"............my apologies, didn't mean to be offensive. A poor choice of words. My point about giving it a few more generations is, simply, that it is going to take more time for science to uncover the information. In the meantime, my sense is that people who promote an evidence-based practice think that if something hasn't been demonstrated in lab conditions, then it is likely invalid and shouldn't be done. THAT is the problem......sort of a simplistic, do-it-my-way attitude.
Re Tesla: , no I didn't see that movie and don't know anything else about it. I thought he was a highly respected scientist/researcher/inventor and that his work was mostly beyond reproach. Maybe I'm wrong. Didn't those cold fusion guys prove to have been frauds? Not what I'm talking about!!!
Ravensara Travillian said:The way I see it, western science doesn't have the equipment or understanding to test for the subtle effects of touch on the human body, just as a few hundred years ago nobody could send up a satellite to take a look at our solar system and our round earth. Give it a few more generations.
If you can't produce results reliably in a lab, how can you reliably promise results to your clients in the much more complex environment that is the human body?
And after we give it a few more generations, what happens if it's still not there? Just keep giving it "a few more generations" ad infinitum? How many "a few more generations" until we get a result that we can reliably promise to our clients?
If it's not in my lifetime, then it's not going to affect my practice.
But in the meantime, there is a lot of clinical/field evidence that there is more going on than can be explained by your world view, so what are the rest of us to do? Keep doing what we're doing, and let others do as they wish.
No, I think the natural material world + emergent effects + chaos theory is sufficient to explain.
But it's arrogant assumptions like you just made about what my "world view" is that convince me that the split is coming. If you can't question the received orthodoxy without being called "closed-minded" or reductionist, or logical positivists or "know-it-alls", then what's the motivation to stay under the same umbrella?
I really think the coming split is not going to be along spa vs. medical lines, but along evidence-based and faith-based lines, and there are spa and medical practitioners in each camp.
"As for the energy crisis, I'm sure you remember than N. Tesla had a system that he claimed would derive electricity on the spot from the earth's magnetic field (at least I think that was the gist of it). Given his almost unbelievable genius, and given that pretty much everything else he claimed about electricity and magnetism has been demonstrated to be true, I would think that scientists would be trying hard to duplicate his research."
Don't you think they did?
Did you see the movie "The Prestige"? Remember how Tesla was duplicating human beings with his device? Do you think that really happened, and science is covering it up?
And remember cold fusion? Are you still waiting for that to be redeemed, as well?
Not everything that can be imagined is possible. Recognizing the difference is a very useful skill in order not to waste your efforts in something that will never pay off.
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Ravensara,
This is actually exactly my point: if they are doing it now, but it isn't being proved in a manner acceptable to evidence-based theory, then should they be told that they are quacks, or that they should stop doing it because science doesn't accept it yet? Or should they be allowed to practice unhindered until science can catch up?
When someone is claiming to have already transcended those laws (which we are using a a guideline to distinguish what is likely to be possible from what is likely to be impossible), why should we wait a "few more generations" for them to prove their claim? Either they are doing what they say they are now, or they are not.
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Lee Edelberg said:
My characterization, RT, was an observation made of some of the people involved in this forum, nothing more.
But you said "people who promote an evidence-based practice", not "some of the people involved in this forum". How are we supposed to know what you mean, if it's not what you say?
What makes me uncomfortable is the attitude that it is a standard that we should all meet. In the contentious thread there were references to practitioners being considered unethical for endorsing reiki, copper pyramids, ionizing foot-baths.Yes, I do think that's exactly the fault line along which the split will occur.
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If they can't connect the dots on how they are doing it, then they are not doing it in an evidence-based way.
They "may" show, they "might" show, "wait a few generations"--none of that is evidence; it's just speculation.
Lee Edelberg said:Ravensara,
This is actually exactly my point: if they are doing it now, but it isn't being proved in a manner acceptable to evidence-based theory, then should they be told that they are quacks, or that they should stop doing it because science doesn't accept it yet? Or should they be allowed to practice unhindered until science can catch up?
When someone is claiming to have already transcended those laws (which we are using a a guideline to distinguish what is likely to be possible from what is likely to be impossible), why should we wait a "few more generations" for them to prove their claim? Either they are doing what they say they are now, or they are not.
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Ok, so it's not evidence. I don't really know who you are talking about, because energy practitioners I know aren't interested in trying to prove anything. They believe in their work and simply do it. Maybe I missed a piece of the discussion somewhere......
Ravensara Travillian said:
If they can't connect the dots on how they are doing it, then they are not doing it in an evidence-based way.
They "may" show, they "might" show, "wait a few generations"--none of that is evidence; it's just speculation.
Lee Edelberg said:Ravensara,
This is actually exactly my point: if they are doing it now, but it isn't being proved in a manner acceptable to evidence-based theory, then should they be told that they are quacks, or that they should stop doing it because science doesn't accept it yet? Or should they be allowed to practice unhindered until science can catch up?
When someone is claiming to have already transcended those laws (which we are using a a guideline to distinguish what is likely to be possible from what is likely to be impossible), why should we wait a "few more generations" for them to prove their claim? Either they are doing what they say they are now, or they are not.
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I think that admitting you're not interested in trying to prove anything is way better than pretending to be all sciency and stuff.
Cheers to the energy practitioners who admit it.
Lee Edelberg said:Ok, so it's not evidence. I don't really know who you are talking about, because energy practitioners I know aren't interested in trying to prove anything. They believe in their work and simply do it. Maybe I missed a piece of the discussion somewhere......
Ravensara Travillian said:
If they can't connect the dots on how they are doing it, then they are not doing it in an evidence-based way.
They "may" show, they "might" show, "wait a few generations"--none of that is evidence; it's just speculation.
Lee Edelberg said:Ravensara,
This is actually exactly my point: if they are doing it now, but it isn't being proved in a manner acceptable to evidence-based theory, then should they be told that they are quacks, or that they should stop doing it because science doesn't accept it yet? Or should they be allowed to practice unhindered until science can catch up?
When someone is claiming to have already transcended those laws (which we are using a a guideline to distinguish what is likely to be possible from what is likely to be impossible), why should we wait a "few more generations" for them to prove their claim? Either they are doing what they say they are now, or they are not.
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If you eliminate all that stuff from massage therapy, then what you are left with is the passive therapy side of physical therapy.
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based on my experience in the clinic, I disagree. Massage therapy based on a biopsychosocial model, without any mysticism, is way more than just the passive therapy side of physical therapy.
Alexei Levine said:
If you eliminate all that stuff from massage therapy, then what you are left with is the passive therapy side of physical therapy.
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BTW, it's sleepy time in England now. c u tomorrow!
Ravensara Travillian said:
based on my experience in the clinic, I disagree. Massage therapy based on a biopsychosocial model, without any mysticism, is way more than just the passive therapy side of physical therapy.
Alexei Levine said:
If you eliminate all that stuff from massage therapy, then what you are left with is the passive therapy side of physical therapy.
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