Scroll of Truth

I don't know who made this cartoon but whoever it is, THANK YOU!

So true. So very true.
Haha at all the spinal HVLA manipulators out there. 

The majority of patients having manual therapy for back or neck pain report adverse events. 

Meanwhile, this might be what manual therapy is REALLY all about..
The interoceptive turn. "The science of how we sense ourselves from within, including our bodily states, is creating a radical picture of selfhood."

Is it ever.

This new paper, just out, proposes that the effects of massage on depression may be all about helping this inner sense of self to change. I would argue this is not limited to only massage but pertains to all slow, kind, interactive, intelligent manual therapy. 

Michael Eggart, Silvia Queri,  Bruno Müller-Oerlinghausen, 2019, Are the antidepressive effects of massage therapy mediated by restoration of impaired interoceptive functioning? A novel hypothetical mechanism. Medical Hypotheses Volume 128, July 2019, Pages 28-32

I wrote this a few days ago: Attention, people with pain: Check out PainChats, by Lissanthea Taylor
Furthermore, "People need to feel HEARD, not HURT" (Lissanthea Taylor).

And, What lurks at the bottom of the chasm?
And, finally,  Testa M and Rossettini G, 2016, Enhance placebo, avoid nocebo: How contextual factors affect physiotherapy outcomes. Manual Therapy 24 (2016) 65-74

What lurks at the bottom of the chasm?

When Dave Nicholl's published this particular blog post, I rejoiced.
Excerpt:

The model does not explain the real world. If it did, it would reside in the real world and one wouldn’t have to study to become a trained health professional to understand and apply it. Biomedicine then, at its worst, sits at odds with the people it is meant to serve; looking, again, rather like a spoilt (white, male), only child of very rich parents, in a room full of people whose lives are very different indeed.

But, then this piece caught my eye, and I rejoiced even more. Philosophical bias is unavoidable by science.
Excerpt: 

One school of thought viewed the new plant as a conventional hybrid and argued that, in most cases, one can deduce the safety of the new plant from knowledge of the safety of its parental GM plants. This means thinking about complexity as being various combinations of unchanging parts. The other school, however, argued that one cannot deduce the safety of the new plant from the safety of the parental GM plants. Here, complexity is thought of as an emergent matter where parts lose their properties and identity in the process of interaction.

Imagine: one idea of complexity is all about nouns (like plant parts) moving around as though they had autonomy or something, and another idea of complexity is that of emergence, that the plant parts are moved by their environment and relationships, interactively, and it's all contextual. 

Then I really rejoiced when I noticed this, today: The Burning Question. 

Trying to find anything specific in therapy of various kinds performed on alive awake cognizant individuals with pain reminds me of Tim Conway skits on the Carol Burnett show, ones in which he would play an old guy trying to open a door but banging it shut with his head, over and over.  


Why did I rejoice?
Because the mystery is becoming more clear. Not what can clear up the mystery.
So is the chasm.
And what is at the bottom of it. 

1.  https://criticalphysio.net/2019/06/05/critique-of-the-biomedical-model-2/
2. Philosophy of biology: Philosophical bias is the one bias that science cannot avoid.
3. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10161759445590183&set=gm.2231921840431689&type=3&theater

Teacher upgrade

When I got back from teaching DNM in Montreal I was exhausted as usual, but I feel like I can see a new vista in my internal landscape. I feel like I was enclosed in my own tunnel of ignorance about teaching for all this time, and didn't even realize I was in one, was dimly aware though how I was out there in the world teaching away with absolutely no teaching skills or tricks, just blurting out foundational stuff and showing a lot of powerpoint slides.
Yannick Wenger from France showed me a few new tricks - like how to draw more out of the minds of the people in the class by asking them what they remembered from the previous day, and making sure their purpose for being there was being fulfilled adequately. The French have been onto all this stuff ever since their revolution, it seems.
Thank you, Yannick.

Theory U
Social constructivism
Universal method of education (Jacotot)

What the class remembered.