a community of practitioners

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

Permalink Reply by Alexei Levine on March 2, 2011 at 5:31pm

What's the difference?

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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Permalink Reply by Lee Edelberg on March 2, 2011 at 5:37pm

Thanks Christopher for your reply.

I can't answer your question(s) about this. My interest in the subtle effects of touch are personal and directly experiential. I can't speak for anyone else, and I have no idea what claims people made that were tested and found to have failed.

The work I do could be done in a lab, but I wouldn't know what to direct a researcher to look for. See the images in my mind? read my client's mind? Check their heart-rate and respiration? Track the tonicity of specific muscles? the electrical conductance of certain nerve pathways? Take a Kirlian photograph of our auras? :-)

Sorry!

Lee

Christopher A. Moyer said:

I think it makes more sense to come at this from the other direction. What would prevent "energy work" from being demonstrable in a controlled setting? It needn't even be a highly artificial setting, to answer the question, 'can these people do what they claim to do?' So-called energy workers claim to sense a biofield. Can they really do this? It's easy to set up a test, and it's been done plenty of times. The claimants never do better than chance.

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Permalink Reply by Marilyn St.John on March 2, 2011 at 6:40pm

Pursuant to the discussion of Reiki and science, I find this hypothesis interesting enough to share:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20189724

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Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on March 3, 2011 at 1:56am

Because we know more about massage than PTs do, we can work with the clients to tailor the massage to their needs. It's not just executing a prescribed routine.

One of my clients in the Refugee Clinic was a soldier on the losing side of a civil war in his country. Despite his best efforts, the other faction succeeded in breaking away and establishing their own nation. He came into the clinic complaining that half of his body was missing.

There is no ready-made massage prescription for *that* complaint. I worked actively with the client and the psychologists to develop a treatment plan for him that used massage to show that he could feel the parts of his body that he claimed were missing.

I don't think PTs do that kind of massage, am I right?

Alexei Levine said:

What's the difference?

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.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on March 3, 2011 at 2:21am

Thanks for the article, Marilyn.

I couldn't get it, since it's behind a paywall, so I'll break the rule I teach students about working from the abstract alone.

Before I do, though, I'll mention the history of *Medical Hypotheses*, because it's not only interesting, but relevant to the discussion.

*Medical Hypotheses* used to have page charges (about 60 dollars per thousand words).

They also didn't have peer review--the editor, Bruce Charlton, was solely responsible for picking the articles to be published. Sometimes he would listen to input from the Advisory Board, and sometimes he wouldn't.

So you don't have any of the usual institutional safeguards to evaluate the validity of the work published, plus you have a financial motive to publish those papers that didn't get peer reviewed. This is the reason that *Medical Hypotheses* is not taken very seriously in scientific circles. It's not because they published ideas outside the mainstream; it's that those ideas did not get any evaluation beyond a single editor.

They stopped taking page charges in 2009, and in mid-2010--slightly before this paper was published, when it would have been in the editorial decision stage--there was an ugly public row when Elsevier decided to institute peer review. The decision came about because Charlton decided to publish a paper by Duesberg, who is reviled in the biomedical community as an HIV/AIDS denialist. To assert that HIV does not cause AIDS is dangerously misleading, because patients who don't believe that may refuse to seek life-extending treatment, such as the "cocktails".

No one is denying that the cocktails suck; just saying that death from untreated AIDS sucks more. And Duesberg's work increases that possibility.

So this one editor decides to publish an article that denies the connection between HIV and AIDS; a controversy breaks out, and the editor is fired. Institutional measures such as peer review are put into place at the journal.

I am telling you this history, not because I want to smear the journal. I am saying that the lack of peer review, and the financial incentive to publish as many pages as possible creates a structural problem for the journal--one which has the risk of publishing a high number of false positive articles, compared to others in the industry. This structural problem led to a very ugly scene, which further damaged the journal and the public discourse it wants to promote.

This will have to be the end of Part 1 for now; I have to run and catch a bus. More later, when I get a chance.

Marilyn St.John said:

Pursuant to the discussion of Reiki and science, I find this hypothesis interesting enough to share:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20189724

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Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on March 3, 2011 at 5:22am

Yay! I did get the article (and for free); reviewing it is *much* better than trying to work from an abstract. Abstracts are wrong in some shockingly high percentage of published articles (I don't have the number at hand, but it's appallingly high).

This way I'll review what the article really says, rather than an abstract that could be mistaken.

Cheers, ttys.

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Permalink Reply by Matthew D. Stewart on March 3, 2011 at 6:48am

It's times like these that I'm glad that my university has 'forgotten' to take me off the proxy server access to the library's electronic databases.

Ravensara, that you for the back story on Medical Hypotheses. And for the reminder about abstract misrepresentation.

Marilyn St.John said:

Pursuant to the discussion of Reiki and science, I find this hypothesis interesting enough to share:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20189724

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Alexei Levine on March 3, 2011 at 7:47am

Ravensara, respectfully, you are wrong about PT's knowing less than MT's about massage. Of course the scope of practice of PT is much broader than that of MT, as it includes everything that MT's do, plus the active side of therapies. (I'm a PT and an LMT). Because of this extremely broad scope of practice there are many PT's who specialize in the active or analytical side of things, and aren't interested in cultivating their manual skills, so that leads to some confusion about what PT's are doing these days. In the 90's it may have been true that PT's were less well versed in their manual skills and knowledge, but it's no longer true. And even then at all the cranio-sacral and MFR programs PT's seemed to outnumber MT's. I'm not certain about that perhaps Walt Fritz could weigh in on that point. These days go to any program or seminar in any type of advanced bodywork or massage, and PT's are present in large numbers. And in the USA, PT's know a lot more about neurorehabilitation than MT's. PT's routinely do this kind of work in all the major rehab hospitals in the USA, while it is extremely rare to find an MT doing that kind of work here. Importantly, in the USA, PT's have more legal rights in general to perform this type of work in the clinical setting, and more rights to insurance reimbursement. PT's and Chiropracters also have large and powerful political machines that will fight to the last drop of blood to resist giving up any of their monopolistic rights to this type of work to anyone else. That is why I'm encouraging MT's not to throw away all the stuff that differentiates them from PT's. As Kris Kelley stated these professions can be viewed as vehicles to get us where we want to go, or do the kind of work we want to do. I agree, and that is why I encourage people who want to do that kind of neurorehab to become PT's rather than try to change the entire profession of MT into a pale imitation of PT.

Please don't get angry and start flaming me for saying this. And everybody else please don't pile on me, I'm just reporting what I see from my perspective as a PT and MT in the USA. I have deep respect for all the great work done by the amazingly intelligent and capable MT's I've had the pleasure of meeting on here :) And I like, and value research :) And Ravensara, you seem like a great guy. I think of this forum as a discussion amongst friends and colleagues supporting each other and the profession, not an antagonistic debate. Personally, I've embraced MT even more than PT.

Ravensara Travillian said:

Because we know more about massage than PTs do, we can work with the clients to tailor the massage to their needs. It's not just executing a prescribed routine.

One of my clients in the Refugee Clinic was a soldier on the losing side of a civil war in his country. Despite his best efforts, the other faction succeeded in breaking away and establishing their own nation. He came into the clinic complaining that half of his body was missing.

There is no ready-made massage prescription for *that* complaint. I worked actively with the client and the psychologists to develop a treatment plan for him that used massage to show that he could feel the parts of his body that he claimed were missing.

I don't think PTs do that kind of massage, am I right?

Alexei Levine said:

What's the difference?

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.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ravensara Travillian on March 3, 2011 at 9:08am

I'll take your word about what the PTs know, Alexei.

That is why I'm encouraging MT's not to throw away all the stuff that differentiates them from PT's. As Kris Kelley stated these professions can be viewed as vehicles to get us where we want to go, or do the kind of work we want to do. I agree, and that is why I encourage people who want to do that kind of neurorehab to become PT's rather than try to change the entire profession of MT into a pale imitation of PT.

Oh, none of my clients would ever mistake the work I do for a pale imitation of PT--no worries on that score.

But are you saying it's the energy work that differentiates us from PTs? Are you advocating for a faith-based litmus test--suspending critical thinking when it comes to energy claims--to separate the profession from the PTs? Because I can't go along with that, if so.

And Ravensara, you seem like a great guy.

Wait, what? <peeks in trousers>

Whew, everything's normal. You scared me for a minute there :).

Alexei Levine said:

Ravensara, respectfully, you are wrong about PT's knowing less than MT's about massage. Of course the scope of practice of PT is much broader than that of MT, as it includes everything that MT's do, plus the active side of therapies. (I'm a PT and an LMT). Because of this extremely broad scope of practice there are many PT's who specialize in the active or analytical side of things, and aren't interested in cultivating their manual skills, so that leads to some confusion about what PT's are doing these days. In the 90's it may have been true that PT's were less well versed in their manual skills and knowledge, but it's no longer true. And even then at all the cranio-sacral and MFR programs PT's seemed to outnumber MT's. I'm not certain about that perhaps Walt Fritz could weigh in on that point. These days go to any program or seminar in any type of advanced bodywork or massage, and PT's are present in large numbers. And in the USA, PT's know a lot more about neurorehabilitation than MT's. PT's routinely do this kind of work in all the major rehab hospitals in the USA, while it is extremely rare to find an MT doing that kind of work here. Importantly, in the USA, PT's have more legal rights in general to perform this type of work in the clinical setting, and more rights to insurance reimbursement. PT's and Chiropracters also have large and powerful political machines that will fight to the last drop of blood to resist giving up any of their monopolistic rights to this type of work to anyone else. That is why I'm encouraging MT's not to throw away all the stuff that differentiates them from PT's. As Kris Kelley stated these professions can be viewed as vehicles to get us where we want to go, or do the kind of work we want to do. I agree, and that is why I encourage people who want to do that kind of neurorehab to become PT's rather than try to change the entire profession of MT into a pale imitation of PT.

Please don't get angry and start flaming me for saying this. And everybody else please don't pile on me, I'm just reporting what I see from my perspective as a PT and MT in the USA. I have deep respect for all the great work done by the amazingly intelligent and capable MT's I've had the pleasure of meeting on here :) And I like, and value research :) And Ravensara, you seem like a great guy. I think of this forum as a discussion amongst friends and colleagues supporting each other and the profession, not an antagonistic debate. Personally, I've embraced MT even more than PT.

Ravensara Travillian said:

Because we know more about massage than PTs do, we can work with the clients to tailor the massage to their needs. It's not just executing a prescribed routine.

One of my clients in the Refugee Clinic was a soldier on the losing side of a civil war in his country. Despite his best efforts, the other faction succeeded in breaking away and establishing their own nation. He came into the clinic complaining that half of his body was missing.

There is no ready-made massage prescription for *that* complaint. I worked actively with the client and the psychologists to develop a treatment plan for him that used massage to show that he could feel the parts of his body that he claimed were missing.

I don't think PTs do that kind of massage, am I right?

Alexei Levine said:

What's the difference?

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.