Trailblazing; No Time Left for Making Nice

Yet another discussion cropped up on SomaSimple, necessary though not without misunderstandings. It had to do with a "health performance solution" system dreamed up by a chiro and sold for major bucks to athletic trainers (among others), a rehash of everything that's already known and recycled endlessly in what I like to think of as "Mesodermolandia", a mythical "rain forest primeval" that gave rise to the world of human primate social grooming. Here is where reliance on "what works" feeds and fosters a conceptual anything goes attitude. Here, safe from challenge to status quo, a predatory spirit of postmodern what-the-bleep-do-we-know-anyway retreat into confused troop mentality flourishes, and a dense fast-growing tangle of argument based on next to nothing at all, combined with the blistering humidity of interpersonal opinion, chokes any real effort to think scientifically or even logically; all ideas underpinning this little subculture remain unexamined yet vigorously exchanged for coin.

After a reasonably successful deconstruction, the thread postmortem included the usual comments re: we weren't "nice" to the bringers - we pressed them for detail on their treatment construct (something seen as a bit rude in this world, believe it or not..), our interchange was seen to be "sarcastic", we seemed "hostile". I wrote the following post in response to these criticisms of our seemingly poor demeanor.

I'd like to point out that therapeutic niceness and politeness is likely what got us the deepest into this boggy morass in the first place, the swamp of erroneous belief, unsupportable treatment construct, and mesodermal bias, out of which grow giant trees of nonsense, treatment systems with deep roots down into the economy, choking out rational thought and real scientific advance of our human primate social grooming professions.

We each wake up one day and realize we have a choice to make - continue playing nice and do nothing, the mental equivalent of living wild and swinging from vine to vine like our primate siblings, OR.... learn to exercise our minds and their capacity to think, sort, discriminate, categorize, make sense, link, develop and strategize a way out of the mental jungle we have found ourselves in. Occam's razor isn't nearly big enough to do the job required in this profession. We need Occam's chainsaw. And when wielding Occam's chainsaw, inevitably some sawdust will get in someone's eye from time to time, or a wood chip hit them on the head, or the roar of the machine itself may sound uncomfortable.

But it's necessary. We mean no one any personal harm. Wear a hard hat and stay out of the way when the big trees topple. We're going to do this, blaze a trail of deconstruction, because we have to find a way for this profession to get itself out to the main road. Don't worry, it's far from being a clearcut.

Personally I'm determined to cut down whatever I need to, and in my tiny backpack I'm salvaging and carrying the essentials of soft kind gentle manual therapy. I get ever more invigorated to the task when more mesodermal bias looms in front of me, blocking my way.