Posted by pegasus on May 16, 2004, at 14:51:23
In reply to Energy Field Therapy, posted by tabitha on May 15, 2004, at 13:25:47
I've been thinking about this type of stuff a lot lately too. Not in the therapy context, but in the context of chinese medicine and accupuncture. The way I've come to think of it is that it seems likely that there is something to these alternative methods, even if we don't know exactly how it works. In the western world we're very caught up in proving things scientifically before we'll try them. But chinese medicine, as one example, developed over thousands of years using a different paradigm. They used trial and error and theories of energy to come up with a very sophisticated system that is different than western medicine. Is trial and error necessarily worse than scientific research? I don't think so. It's just more foreign to the western way of thinking. We tend to want explanations and research before we'll trust anything. My experiences with western medicine have convinced me that even if we do understand some things in that system, there is a lot we still don't understand. (And a lot of things that doctors sound like they're so confident about that they truly know diddly about.) Some of the things that are not understood by western science might be perfectly treatable if we don't require the standard of scientific proof.
And, by the way, EMDR has been studied more thoroughly than almost any other method used in therapy today, and has shown strong and consistent results indicating that it can be effective. So I personally wouldn't say that it falls into the "potential mumbo jumbo" category. We don't know exactly why it works (although there are reasonable theories), but we certainly know *that* it works.
Speaking here as a bona fide scientist (in the western tradition) and frequent skeptic.
pegasus
poster:pegasus
thread:347160
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040512/msgs/347460.html