Bodywork Needs Bulldogs

This started in a fb dialogue about Active Isolated Stretching, then digressed:

I don't think that a bodywork method must be proved by double blind/controlled studies to have potential as a viable working model. I do think, however, that too much stuff gets woven together in what's being taught, some of which is based on good anatomical understanding and sound physiology and some of which, like energy cysts actually existing in the muscles and storing emotions, for example, comes right outa left field, yet is being taught as truth. I see that as a big problem in our field.

If a person has a DO, Rpt, PhD, MD after his name and is selling fools gold with the gold, most folks accept blindly what they are learning without stopping to even notice the fools gold or try to ascertain how much of what they got is just that. Accredation from related fields somehow lends weight to these teachers' creds, as though they are not capable of perpetrating misinformation just as well as the rest of us.

If a method doesn't hold up under scientific scrutiny, like Iridology, for example, it is very common for the person selling it as a creed, with a cult following in place, to then write off the scientific studies as being unable to be subtle enough, (or similar balderdash) to properly assess the work. That way they can go on selling it, without regard for the fact that it has just been clearly proved to have absolutely no diagnostic reliability and no inter-tester reliability. IE, it ain't any more reliable than tossing a coin.

An ethical practitioner with no personal profit or ego agenda gummin up the works would then have to trash that idea and go back to the drawing board. That is what the scientific method demands. And it is not an unreasonable demand.

It is how we know as much as we do about the universe around and within us.

At one time most folks, encouraged by the Catholic church, were sure that the Earth was the center of the universe.


Galileo was jailed for using good science to discover otherwise.


We need to be more careful in our understanding of the foundations of the work we are doing and more Dick Tracy in sorting out that which is known to be true, like the existence of spindle cells and golgi tendon organs in striated muscle (but not in smooth muscle) and that which is merely a working model of how best to utilize their actions in the sarcomeres to the advantage of the client's improved performance.

If those who taught this stuff would simply teach the difference between what is their opinion and what is sound science, our field wouldn't be so full of well meaning quackery and incorrect assumptions. If we want to improve our effectiveness we must be open to admitting when our assumptions need tweaking to be true.


When someone teaches so many seconds for this, exhale for that, don't hold at the end because it might engage the spindle cells and reverse the increased ROM, I want to know that they have done their homework, know of which they speak, and are not just making it up as they go. I'm perfectly capable of whistlin Dixie off key, already, I don't need further instruction.

Tons of poppycock is being sold out there. Lots of folks are making big bucks selling it. Many of whom are charismatic nice guys with the best of intentions who are sure they're right. That, and a few impressive letters trailing their names, should not be enough to warrant having faith in everything they're teaching.

Something very bad happens to most egos when they get stroked by hoards of fawning acolytes. They, too, come to believe every fanciful conjuring is solid 24 karat. They, too, believe the press about themselves and fueled by raving minions, soar in ego grandiosity right up to Icarian heights.

The air's thin up there. It gets hot. Wings melt.
Erected egos go limp flamin out in a crashing flash.

Wouldn't it be kinder of us who are eager for knowledge, genuine knowledge, to spare them that distraction from their personal development by challenging their assumptions with hard direct questions instead of accepting everything they teach at face value?

As a result of thinking about all this, a few quotes from Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, as he liked to call himself, have been up for me lately:

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.