published 3/04/09, updated 8/13/09

Therapy Babble

Another warning sign of therapy of dubious quality

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE
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Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

Recently I wrote about therapists who like to call themselves “healers,” how much they annoy me, and why most of them probably aren’t healing anyone. Today, a related concept: “therapy babble.” Illustrated by a couple awesome comic strips from Rudis Muiznieks of Cectic.com, the comic strip for skeptics.

Therapy babble is an irritating combination of jargon/bafflegab and pseudoscience or “abused” science that sounds impressive but means little. Therapy babble often always starts with a folksy preamble that clarifies or confirms something fairly obvious in a charming way — “So the spine is like a stack of bricks, see?” This is a tactic to build credibility and engage the audience, before moving decisively into wild speculation presented as though it is a serious professional opinion.

The therapy babbler loves nothing better than a theory that sounds plausible but can’t or likely won’t be tested experimentally.

The therapy babbler is full of big talk about things that cannot possibly be known (or done) with any confidence, such as excessively complex “foot bone is connected to the jaw bone” type theories, or dot-connecting theories. This is a general failing of alternative health care: assigning significance to things that are really subtle and/or complex, to the point of absurdity. For instance, many a therapy babbler has babbled about craniosacral therapy — a treatment that asks us to believe that therapists are not only able to “manipulate the cerebrospinal fluid circulatory rhythm” but to do it with such mastery of the human nervous system that they can reliably produce a therapeutic effect. Is anyone that smart? No — no one is that smart. No one is actually capable of therapeutically manipulating your nervous system by lightly touching your head. Anyone who claims that they can do so has an inflated self-esteem.

And the therapy babbler is highly prone to producing theories just for the sake of being contrary, for the sheer joy of putting down science and “mainstream” medicine, and always with the side benefit of trying to look impressive by comparison. One of the all-time best examples I have ever seen of this is John Barnes’ attack on science in Massage Magazine in August, 2009 (see http://www.massagemag.com/News/massage-news.php?id=7473).

The next time you hear therapy babble, bear in mind that therapists are just not trained all that well compared to physicians and scientists — and even physicians and scientists often make significant logical errors!

While it’s true that physicians lack knowledge of musculoskeletal health care, it’s equally true that therapists (physiotherapists, massage therapists, chiropractors) are limited to knowledge of musculoskeletal health. We just don’t know much about science or physiology in general. Oh, sure, some of us studied it some in school … but it’s nothing like what doctors learn. They spend about twice as long in school, specialists much more than that, and they typically get much greater direct experience with a wider array of health problems. They are definitely much better educated than therapists.

And yet, even with all that training, there are still many doctors who are not particularly good critical thinkers, don’t know their scientific method, get way behind on their journal reading, and so on. Even those who go into research still suffer from serious biases, pride and illogic, sloppy methods and hallucinatory optimism, all the usual human failings that make science an imperfect endeavour that requires peer review and other checks and balances — and so such doctors get criticized by their colleagues for it, their research gets marginalized, it gets referenced only by people who share the bias, and so on. Even within that world of science and true medical expertise, many still aren’t smart enough to play with the big boys, and never make a valuable contribution — entire careers of half-assed science leading exactly nowhere. Yikes.

My point: therapists are not generally qualified to participate in scientific discussions, let alone to promote complex or dubious untested theories. Most of us should not be babbling about therapy at all. We should be curiously, humbly reading books written by scientists and science journalists for a general audience, and a few therapy journals maybe. We should be starting practically every we say with “maybe” or “perhaps,” and saying “I don’t know” more often than anything else — because we usually don’t. And that’s true even after studying the science deeply for many years.

Therapy Babble

Another warning sign of therapy of dubious quality

Credentials and qualifications

Further Reading