jackson@ttidcb.UUCP (Dick Jackson) (03/18/86)
* * * Some people have been asserting that chiropractry and (psycho) therapy are generally not effective. Others that they make you feel good. (That's meant to be a quick, non-rigourous summary of what I have been reading.) Obviously there is no necessary contradiction here. Most of what a *real* doctor does usually is to make you feel good, your bod fixes itself most of the time and probably better when the quack has reassured you that what you have is not a previously unknown and terminal condition. Studies that show that this and that widely followed treatment are fundamentally ineffective are disturbing - I personally know several clinical psychologists who are very caring and REALLY BELIEVE that they can "cure" their patients hang ups. They would be very upset by the assertion that what is really going on is that they talk to the patients for an hour every week, make the patients happier because someone is really interested in them, and that the patients "recover" as time passes and would have done so anyway in the absence of therapy (several hundreds, at least, dollars to the good). So, yes, while therapy is an ineffective sham, it is based upon an unconscious conspiracy between the therapists and the patients. If the sham were totally and clearly exposed, would they be better off? Probably not. However, if I were an insurance company, I would not pay for it. Time to stop this rambling, Dick Jackson.