I have seen it in my practice

Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment and clinical experience

One of the common arguments I encounter from PTs (probably also from patients and others) is personal experience and “i have seen it” argument.

Why is I have seen it argument flawed most of the time:

One of the common notions in Indian and eastern philosophies is the idea of “mayai” or illusion.  An illusion as we are well aware is – what you see is not the truth. I am not going in the philosophical arguments (you may read J. K if you really want to understand) but the scientific one.
I am going to use a simple example which we all learn in school

When you drop a feather (a lighter object) and a ball (heavier object) you will see the ball dropping to the ground faster than feather. The observer may conclude the heaver object falls faster than a lighter.  However anyone who has done 6^th standard physics will know the gravitational force is a is a constant- hence the above statement cannot be true.
So you end up tearing yourself- whether what I have seen is untrue or whether the physics I have read has an “alternative”.  Well the physicist does not tear themselves- they look into the flaws and the confounding factors in the observation – they just don’t say- sometimes the G force is behaving badly.

 Well the physicist do not tear themselves- they look into the flaws and the confounding factors in the observation – they just don’t say- sometimes the G force is behaving badly (for this observation)

Well when the same thing happens in clinical setting to most of us. We see our patient getting better with IFT, traction, the K-tape, SI and all the other one hundred things people are selling. But most of the time the justification for all these treatments are flawed, pseudoscience or plain ridiculous.

In medicine most of see something happening to our patient and when it is good, we look for justification. When the physiology or the science is not able to justify we fall back on the alternate ridiculous answer.

These are the top 5 ridiculous statements i like:

1.       Jane Ayres – sensory diet- can’t stop laughing even now

2.       The internal organs are all in the hand and feet- just a insult to one’s own brain

3.       K-tape will facilitate muscle action- really the brain, the psychological factors, the social factors etc is just a joke?

4.       Hands are the physiotherapists most important organ- he touched the patient and he got better- really?

5.       Last but the most ridiculous – Cranio-sacral therapy- should check with your neurologist if you think this is “therapy”

I can hear people screaming- I have seen these being done, seen patient getting better with these magic (could not get to type therapy). Remember the G force is constant – lighter objects don’t fall slower; it is just that we have not controlled the n- number of factors in our observation. That is why you need experiments- with controlling all these parameters in medicine and science in general. Don’t take the easy route in finding alternates to why it happened- rather question first did it happen?- that is did my patient get better or is it an illusion because of the “n” factors- including natural recovery, fooling your brain, fooling patients brain or just wishful thinking. Then think of explanation for what you have observed and not the “alternative one”- the real answer which is hard, cumbersome and hard to come by. Then we will call ourselves as practitioner of science we call Physiotherapy.

PS- the Galileo thought experiments and the moon experiments gives us the right answer why the feather falls down and the remove the illusion and help us see clearly

watch the hammer and feather drop experiment on the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_15_feather_and_hammer_drop.ogg

one of the most interesting videos

love
Hariohm