"I Have a Meme..."

A PT colleague in Nova Scotia just wrote this resounding echo of Martin Luther King's famous speech on a discussion forum called SomaSimple.

It speaks to the effort people on that board (and I'm proud to count myself among them) are making to try to wake up our broader human primate social grooming community to the simple fact that nervous systems run bodies, that manual therapy researcher/clinicians spend far too much time obsessing over mesodermal minutiae and constructing science projects designed to flatter themselves and their mesodermal obsessions, Balnibarian-like. (You might remember Balnibarians from Gulliver's Travels. They specialized in inside-out and backward science:)

After requesting to leave the island, Gulliver is lowered to the continent of Balnibari and enters its metropolis, Lagado, where the crops are poorly managed, people wear ragged clothing, and the houses are in bad condition–except for the house of the governor of Lagado. He tells Gulliver that 40 years before, some Lagado residents visited Laputa and came away with a smattering of mathematics that caused them to undertake bold scientific projects and other heady enterprises. They even built an academy in which to carry out their projects. Now every town in Balnibari has an academy, and the people spend most of their time conducting experiments. For example, at the Academy of Lagado, scientists are attempting to do the following: extract sunbeams from cucumbers, turn human feces back into food, erect buildings from the roof down, plow farmland with pigs, make marbles soft enough to stuff pillows and pincushions, breed sheep whose entire bodies are bald, and have students learn mathematics by swallowing wafers on which formulas are written.
.......So absorbed in these enterprises are the inhabitants that they avoid taking part in almost all other activities.

A lot of the participants on this discussion board, SomaSimple, including me, just shake our heads and wonder what on earth we are doing in this profession that tests our sanity so, a little community of skeptics with the odd true believer thrown in to keep things rolling along (every discussion board needs dissent to keep it alive, I suppose). It's the small version of larger debates going on everywhere among those who like to think and those who want to simply believe.