The Thinking Practitioner: interview highlights

Whitney Lowe and Til Luchau interviewed me recently for The Thinking Practitioner podcast, which is by and for massage and manual therapists. I’ve done many interviews now (getting to be a bit of a habit), but this one stood out as an especially comfortable and substantive chat. Me talk pretty sometimes. What did we talk about? Quite a bit! There’s a long list on the episode page. You can listen and/or watch on YouTube.

I got a serviceable transcript of the episode, using tools that didn’t exist until very recently. Here are three highlights:

Are you a massage profession outsider or insider?

I’m a hybrid! You can’t do 10 years of clinical work, and you can’t spend the kind of money I spent on my education, without feeling like an insider. I mean, I was a massage therapist. But it’s been a long time! It’s been 15 years since I was last working as a clinician. And so that feeling is fading and more and more I do feel a little bit like an outsider. Also, I engage with other professions more and more often as I progress in my career, and I’m writing about a much wider range of topics than I would have dared to attempt back then. So I’m spreading out! More and more, I don’t feel like I’m in the massage therapy club anymore, but I still have a foot really firmly in it. There were just too many years when that was my identity.

Is satisfaction with therapy enough?

Clients can be satisfied completely independently of whether or not they’re actually getting helped. Satisfaction is in many ways very easy to achieve. People want to be satisfied. They want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, so it’s pretty easy to get them there. It’s just a matter of telling people what they want to hear, and that’s never hard. Actually helping people with serious chronic pain, in contrast, is really difficult. Lots of people with chronic pain are “satisfied” patients, but still have chronic pain. So there’s a fairly wide gap between effectiveness and satisfaction.

How do you distinguish between being cynical or negative about the profession and being like rigorous about the evidence?

I don’t bother to distinguish anymore. I have a saying: if you’re not cynical, you’re not paying attention. I don’t know how any bright, compassionate person in this world could possibly avoid cynicism. If you’re looking at what’s going on in the world around you, if you’re paying attention to the experience of people who are marginalized, for instance, you’re gonna get cynical, you’d better get cynical. And I feel the same way about the subject matter in this field: I don’t know how you pay attention to it without some negativity.

I’ve always been accused of negativity, and it’s always been, you know, 100% true and 100% ridiculous at the same time. Yeah, of course, there is an aspect to what I do that’s very negative. But it’s also a silly and irrelevant accusation at the same time. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s true, and trying to understand. What matters is caring about and working with people to try to find our way to something helpful. If that requires a certain amount of debunking and negativity, so be it.