This is a tremendously important and interesting post from Todd Hargrove at BetterMovement.org
Hargrove speaks of reviewing many different approaches to manual therapy. "Some ideas are good, some are not so good. And some are rather obviously wrong, but somehow extremely resistant to correction in the face of huge amounts of conflicting evidence. And they seems to pop up everywhere, in different therapies that have different origins, like a weed that always needs to be pulled. Of this latter group of ideas, two different patterns of thinking really stand out in my mind."
1) Structuralism:
the tendency to treat the body as a mindless piece of meat, while ignoring the role of the brain in giving it all the qualities we actually care about, like how it moves and feels. Much education for PTs remains mired in structuralism, and fails to incorporate new and interesting information from neuroscience and pain science.
2) Vitalism:
the idea that there is some essential force or energy (chi, prana, elan vital, the breath of life) that is unique to life, that can be manipulated by a therapist to optimize a client’s health. Much education at massage schools, alternative medicine schools include a healthy dose of vitalism, and has little grounding in basic physics and neuroscience.
Excellent food for thought as we try to move forward in our disciplines and to create a schema that works and makes sense for our patients and makes sense relative to basic science.
Read the whole posting, as he really does explain some of the reasons why we tend to think in these dualistic ways.
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