The False Humility of “Facilitating” Healing

Facilitating self-healing is either real but trivial, or interesting but wrong.

Paul Ingraham • Oct 9, 2020 • 5m read

The idea of facilitating self-healing is a classic bit of insincere and muddled humility that is routinely expressed by alternative medicine practitioners as if it’s wisdom. Here is a classic formulation:

A healer is not someone that you go to for healing. A healer is someone that triggers within you, your own ability to heal yourself.

This is sacharine, silly, inspirational-poster nonsense, “so deep it’s meaningless.” Self-healing is a classic “deepity”: that is, the most prosaic interpretation of the idea is true but trivial, while the most profound and interesting interpretation is just paradoxical nonsense.

True but trivial…

What is the most prosaic interpretation of “your own ability to heal”? Well, yes, animals can heal. We can heal from most injuries and many illnesses. This is true, but so what? It’s neither surprising, nor is it anything that needs to be “triggered.” It’s an innate ability, not a rare gift only for properly inspired animals.

Or profound but wrong (in two ways)

There are two profound implications of this sentiment:

We have the potential to heal exceptionally well, better than what is generally considered possible. That would be miraculous! And also not possible. We’re basically talking about magic now. Of course there is a natural range of how well people heal, but that’s attributable to genetics and fitness.
This healing power can be unlocked or facilitated or triggered or whatever by your friendly neighbourhood massage therapist, chiropractor, or homeopath. That would be amazing, but it’s even sillier than the idea of exceptional healing. And, if someone belives they can do that… so much for humility!

Which brings us to the central paradox of the facilitated-healing meme.

The humility paradox

If above-average healing requires facilitation, then it’s not self-healing, now is it? That’s the central paradox of this meme: it’s asserting a claim of an impressive power over patients while also trying to sound like “it was nothing.”

And if it’s not self-healing — if one human can kick-start another human’s healing — then we’re back to the idea of healing, not self-healing, and humility goes out the window.

You can’t have it both ways: you can believe in facilitating healing, or you can be humble, but you cannot do both. And you cannot pack them into the same statement without it turning into nonsense.

Are we intuitive about our health? Hell no! On animals and the limits of self-care

Russian wellness influencer Zhanna D’Art has allegedly died from taking her own advice (August 2023): a “fully fruit-based-low-fat diet” probably caused malnutrition and infections that finally killed her.

There have been many deaths by self-help like this over the years, but they are certainly out at the edges of the bell curve. For every tragic death by self-care, how many less extreme cases are there? People feeling merely rather or somewhat unwell thanks to their misguided wellness optimizations? And then rationalizing and justifying their symptoms as part of the process, maybe a “healing crisis”?

Or, worst of all, how many misinterpret their symptoms as the reason for their efforts? “I feel awful today, so I should eat even more fruit.”

Distrust of doctors, medicine, and science is rampant, of course, and so more people than ever are trying to help themselves. Long ago, a popular blog post went viral by arguing that “animals just like you have been taking health into their own hands and paws for millions of years.” Cute, quotable, and there is some truth in that, of course … but it also rings hollow for the victims of dire medical problems and chronic pain, and countless less serious problems that just cannot be “hacked.”

Chronic pain in particular seems to inspire quixotic and reckless self-help experiments, probably because pain is damned motivating, and because there is no other kind of help to be had. And so I have witnessed many cases of people who pursued futile, expensive, and risky self-help strategies — believing themselves to be “educated” and “empowered,” when in truth they were far from it. I don’t know anyone who has died trying to treat their own pain, but I have personally known dozens who suffered more than they had to, and seen clear evidence of hundreds more examples in my correspondence and on social media.

Human animals are really not innately good at “taking health into their own hands.” Indeed, we routinely screw it up royally! We are tormented by countless afflictions utterly beyond our power to prevent or treat — with or without professional help. “And so it goes” (Vonnegut).

Whether you’re getting help, or trying to help yourself, the focus should always, relentlessly be on what is cheapest, safest, and most believable. That’s great in theory, but humans struggle greatly with these. We are rotten with magical thinking and seemingly itching to win a Darwin Award. Exhibit A (out of millions of examples):

Seriously, non-human animals are way better at self-care than this. They do not, at least, actively sabotage themselves. As one commenter put it, “Hubby is going to need one less onion sock in the future.”

So what’s the appeal of facilitated healing?

If self-healing cannot be profound without being unbelievable, and can’t be believable without being boring, why claim it?

The whole point of touting facilitated healing is to seem like a “healer” without coming right out and saying it. It’s blatant humble-bragging, defined as making “an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud.” Perfect.

Crediting the patient with doing the heavy lifting is also a good way to avoid explaining how, exactly, healing is “facilitated.”

Examples of humble-bragging about helping people heal

A massage therapist asked, in a large Facebook group for massage therapists:

Am I the only one who feels like massage therapists are healers in a way?

As of this writing, there are 287 comments, with a fairly even mixture of yays and nays. Clearly many people are happy to embrace the term to varying degrees. One of the strongest themes in the comments is this seemingly self-deprecating idea that massage merely facilitates self-healing:

I am not healing the body, only reminding itself it knows how to heal itself.
I think we are Facilitators of self healing.
The body heals itself. We can assist them in the capacity of facilitators (when the conditions are right) and when we are tuned into what’s under our hands.
We aren’t healers, we just help your muscles fix themselves.
All healing comes from within. We are merely skilled facilitators.
No amount of effort from the therapist will help “heal” a condition a person is suffering from unless they are willing to do the work themselves.
I believe God heals but I’m His Tool.
I consider a healer to be someone who facilitates time and space and attention for self healing to occur.
In the end, the patient does the healing.
We hold space for the body to heal itself.
We are all healers, of ourselves. We are facilitators when working w/ others.
Bringing awareness is part of healing.

Again and again, you can see the attempt to humbly disclaim, to push the claim of healing away while still embracing the spirit of it. It’s particularly clear in a comment like this:

I didn’t say we are healers, I said we are facilitators of healing.

A distinction without a difference! Some therapists are willing to embrace the term “healer,” while others want to seem a little more humble about it … while claiming essentially the same thing.

About Paul Ingraham

I am a science writer in Vancouver, Canada. I was a Registered Massage Therapist for a decade and the assistant editor of ScienceBasedMedicine.org for several years. I’ve had many injuries as a runner and ultimate player, and I’ve been a chronic pain patient myself since 2015. Full bio. See you on Facebook or Twitter., or subscribe:

What’s new in this article?

2020 — Converted from blog post to permanent article, polished, and expanded a little. (And this is a pretty simple article, so it may never evolve beyond this.)

2019 — Publication.

https://www.painscience.com/articles/facilitating-self-healing.php

PainScience.com/facilitated_healing
PainScience.com/facilitating_healing
PainScience.com/false_humility_of_facilitated_healing

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