Originally Posted by
taai gihk yahn
Sal, with all due respect, this is a blanket statement that really needs to be appropriately qualified if you want to be taken seriously (probably you don't care either way, but whatever); point is this: what sort of "illnesses" re you "healing, what evidence do you use to assess your efficacy? do people come to you with medical diagnoses and tests that you use in a before / after assessment, or is it that they come with the sort of complaints that the docs don't know what to call / do with, etc., and after seeing you they feel better?
consider what sort of patients come to you - the degree of pre-selfselection of your clinetel will heavilly bias the results you get; people come to you expecting to be healed by qigong; therefore, you have a powerful entrainment effect mixed in with the already innate capacity of the organism to drive itself towards autonomic balance / homeostasis when interracting in a "therapeutic" way with another individual; which is how the qigong, faith healers, reiki masters, polarity and any other "energy" healers" essentially achieve the healing effects they talk about - it's not what they are doing particularly, it's something intrinsic to have we are; as such there is a phennomenon of regression towards the mean, meaning that in many cases, doing just about anything will alleviate certain symptoms if they are mediated primarilly via the autonomics (which accounts for a lot of stuff, especially since many people are "sick" because they have been living in chronic sympathetic overdrive / chronic inflammatory response for years, and when you engage parasympathetics via the sort of phenomenon common to all energy healing, you get beneficial effects)
this is, frankly, the typical attitude of an amateur practitioner; and I don't say this as an insult, it's just statement of fact; as an amateur, you have the luxury of essentially creating your own context for what you do
what happens when what you do doesn't work? how do you rethink your strategy?
there's no free lunch - if a technique has the power to help, it also has the power to harm - not understanding why what one does works, that's just irresponsible; what happens if your patient has a bad effect? as a professional w a license, I am held accountable if I am negligent - as such, my patient's have recourse if I do them harm due to my innapporpriate treatment - this is great, as it helps keep me on my toes, and gives them recourse in case I don't; who oversees you if you screw up? no one - and hence, you have the luxury of the above noted perspective;
this is why as a professional you know about precautions and contraindications to certain things, and also when to refer out because someone has red flags you aren't trained to deal with
as a professional, one is constantly working to understand more and more why what one does works, because it's the only way to use what one knows efficiently and responsibly;
unfortunately, one can practice as an "energy healer" and basically get away with this sort of attitude, because the techniques" one uses "work" not in function of what you are doing, but because it is in the nature of the organism to respond to generalized input by driving towards homeostasis - meaning that you can very effectively influence autonomics to balance out simply by having the intention to do so, even if the patient is not pre-invested in what you are doing;
it's a big world of "healing" out there Sal; from the sound of things, you've experienced only one little piece of it...
and I know that your default argument is that you healed yourself, that you saved your own life w your qigong practice, and that gives you the purview to say whatever you want without thinking you should be contradicted; make no mistake, I am not disputing this in any way - it is entirely possible that what you did had exactly the effect you believe it did; and that's awesome; but it has nothing to do with what happens when one starts treating others, especially if one is not trained specifically to do so; it's a different set of criteria when one claims to be having specific effects as a result of what one does, and having a "I don't care why it works, it just does" perspective is intellectually and ethically disingenuous;
funny, btw, how you don't need proof of anything, except that you start a thread highlighting how there is "scientific" proof for thoughts creating reality, etc.; so I guess that the "proof" is ok when it supports your perspective...
