[Closed] Wanting to set up holistic therapy business opinions please

[i]so, where do I locate my aura? [/i]

you'll need a mirror, and possibly some KY

i have no idea what your talking about mate?

i shattered my knee in july. have been concentating on it consistantly since but its still giving me jip. any suggestions?

Next time you get really ill, look at life expectancy in the secular scientific first world, and then at the same figures for people using chakra pointy finger 'medicine'.

If the placebo, sorry, alternative therapy isn't working, maybe some real therapy is in order? Just to 'complement' a bit of shamanism, mind.

If people in the stone/bronze age could heal everything I'm not sure why we've bothered with developing medical techniques further. Oh hang on, maybe that [u]development[/u] is actually the key to it??

I had a shiatsu massage once. On honeymoon at the dead sea. The guy was very nice, He dug his elbows into my back quite hard for a bit, then told me I had "weak kidneys".
Clever fella. I had had the usual bought of upset tum so was probably a bit dehydrated, so he was probably right.
Doesn't mean that Shiatsu is a valid evidence based treatment, it just means he knew most Europeans got a bit of dicky tum, and had clocked my dry lips.
But then I went into with a sceptical head on, it was all part of the experience, I had nothing to lose but a bit of cash.
I would worry when someone takes a problem to a complimentary therapist and is given the same sort of confident advice based on nothing more than an educated guess.
"Good" therapists are a bit like Derren Brown really if you ask me. Good people skills, able to spot what people want to hear and tell them that in a way that makes them feel better.

I think one of the differences between complimentary and conventional medicine is the openness of the establishment. Conventional medicine is constantly re-appraising its treatments and is quite happy to change advice in light of new research- lots of examples of drugs that stop being used after years of being "firstline" because new evidence tells us that they aren't as good as we once thought they were. Negative trials are published as well as positive ones, and guidelines look at all the available evidence as a whole.
I don't see that happening in complimentary medicine- or am I wrong?

from a 'holistic massage' site again:

At the end of the session the therapist may give you advice about what you can do in between treatments to maintain or improve your body's equilibrium. This may be through gentle yoga or chi kung based exercises or dietary changes. For example, if you had the complaint of frequent headaches, it may be tension but one of the contributory factors may be too many caffeinated drinks (fizzy drinks, cups of tea, coffee, hot chocolate, for example) and a need to up their water intake. This is empowering as you are able to take responsibility for helping yourself 'get better' and this in turn really helps to boost self-esteem.

so if you feel the old massage hasnt cured all your ills... why not cut out caffeine? that fixed it? yeh? good. probably cos you had a massage right?

nope your not wrong at all this is why it gets a bad rap.
i was lucky to find a practioner that could show me how to look after things myself but there are loads of rubbish ones out there.

OP - you're very brave - as soon as I saw the thread title I knew there would be a riot.

There has been some sound business advice in amongst the trolling and shouting though.... A member of my extended family runs (one of?) the largest Traditional Chinese Medicine centres in Scotland.

She started off being driven from client to client in an old banger, practising mostly accupuncture. After perhaps six months of this, she took a room in a centre in Edinburgh, filled with other practitioners of various kinds (at the top of Cockburn St, Edinburgh). She just hired a room for three hours a day.

She made an excellent name for herself and opened her own clinic in a trendy part of Leith - if you live in Edinburgh you'll probably have seen it. She then filled the place with other practitioners, renting rooms out. Expansion followed and she now has clinics in most of the major Scottish cities, so it can be done, with a lot of hard work and good luck.

Just as an aside, I set up the Inverness clinic (sadly no more) during my Summer off at uni and was responsible for contacting practitioners and getting them to rent rooms. There was only one total quack that I met - she claimed to be able to read your dreams...... by telephone!! You had to phone a number costing £5 a minute and relate your dream to an ansaphone. She would then write out an analysis and send it to you. What a crock!!

nonk- was it M.E?

no mate chrohns had me by the scruff.

so I take it you're on mesalazine or something similar then?

nope nothing at all.

not ever?

first six months.
stopped it when i changed the diet.and yeah it did get worse for a while then started to recover.
if i get problems now i just clean up the diet a bit reduce the volume of intake and work on the meridians that get tight. those being liver and small intestine.and of course large intestine but most folks could say that.
amazing forum this you state what you have found and your a cock.

nonk, please don't discount modern medicine when it comes to the management of your Crohn's. As I'm sure you know only too well, it's a nasty disease that goes through relapse and remission, and I would hope you're getting reviewed regularly.

oh yeah i never said a thing to sugest that i had turned my back on medical help.
my brother in law is a gp.
he thought i was of my trolley in the early days.

just dont need the meds anymore

i never said a thing to sugest that i had turned my back on medical help.

Isn't it as likely that because you understand your problem, and can adjust your diet when needed, as well as gain a degree of control over it in a psychological sense, that that is what works rather than the chakra stuff?

I'm finding this a difficult thing to say because I don't want to 'take away the magic' if you know what I mean.

there has been some research into the role of probiotics/macrobiotics in crohns disease

I have read similar, and indeed it has been common practice to manage the diet for Crohns/IBD for a while (a couple of acquaintances have had various extremes of the condition). I dont see quite where "work[ing] on the meridians that get tight" comes into a proven therapeutic technique.

to be honest stoner me neither but i was well advised to get a meridian chart of my own and work out myself what heappens to them as my symptoms arise.
it was the changes that i noticed after recieving treatment from the practitioner that gave me the motivation to do it.
pre illness my mindset would have been much like yours but when your suffering..

your right doc i did but a bit much spin on that in my first post.

sorry crikey, maybee but it all seems to work so i dont wish to stop any of it.

Right, full apology from me for any cock references.

I don't believe any of it, but it has allowed you to get to grips with a proper nasty problem, and it's the outcome that counts, not the way you get there.

It's all a bit questionable to me. My sports physio had a holistics person in the same clinic, hopi ear candles indeed.

If it floats your boat, fine - enjoy it, but peddling it to people as a solution to physical ailments seems somewhat fraudulent to me.

Either way, it doesnt seem like a good career to be heading into this moment, I've seen two local "clinics" go down the pan - people don't tend to spend as much on luxuries when the economy is falling apart.

try looking at some of the terminology used by quantum physicists to describe their work,

The terminology is irrelevant, quantum mechanics makes very detailed predictions about the outcomes of physical phenomena. It isn't gibberish.

cheers crikey no bother man.

i agree that there is loads of hippy tosh under the holistic banner
but for me there is a few diamonds in there.
something i have found a laugh over the last few years is seeing if it holds up with mates's ailments yknow..does this hurt then? yes y bugger it does.

It would be perhaps more interesting to hear from people who've received complementary therapy and found it lacking or mis-sold rather than the same old wiki-wisdom & cut'n'paste knowledge being aired again and again.......

wiki-wisdom & cut'n'paste

feeling threatened hilldodger?

I quoted from Wiki an introduction to the belief in Chakra as a spiritual idea.
Do you disagree with its contents?

The vast majority of the soft-headed that pay for the more ridiculous kinds of quackery, are more often than not the most likely to benefit from the emotional component of any placebo effect.

stoner. there is a few systems chap the indian one differs from the japanese one etc.
i never had anty spiritual stuff to think about.it really was just a case of when this bit fails this bit over here will hurt due to stagnation of energy so just give it a bit of a shove.

Entertaining thread 🙂

We have the scoffers and mockers on one hand - some of whom have very closed minds indeed and the gullible on the other side who consider anecdote to be evidence.

I am trained in western "conventional" medicine but have had some complementary therapies with varying results.

There is no doubt there is a lot of placebo effect in "alternative" therapies but also in "conventional"

My experience - I approached this with a healthy open minded sceptisim

Homeopathy - totally ineffective - and seems like clear snake oil
Osteopathy - inexplicable effects - I have even had cranial osteopathy which is the most bunkum of the lot - but the cranial osteopathy had positive effects that lasted. The practitioners varied from snake oil salesmen to dedicated and professional
Chiropractic - no obvious effects
Acupuncture - unbelievably powerful. Real lasting and noticeable effects.

One interesting thing I found was challenging the bunk the therapists say. A couple of them would engage on this basis and gave me some interesting explanations based in western medical language which actually made logical sense such swapping sympathetic and parasympathetic systems for Chi.

My conclusion - and yes I know this is all anecdote not evidence - is that there is some real effects buried underneath a pile of mumbo jumbo - perhaps only a few %. I also conclude that many "conventional" trained medical bods have totally closed minds - its a product of the way they are trained unfortunately.

due to stagnation of energy

Oh come on. Between this gibberish and that lunacy about arranging water molecules in your socks on the other thread, am I the only one that gets a feeling we're sinking back into the dark ages?

Im off to de-stagnate the energy in my beer-aura.

Stoner - if they said " understimulation of parasympathetic system" instead would that help?

Are you going to be a snake oil masseuse or are you going to be a go in and beat the meat type?

[i]feeling threatened hilldodger?[/i]
😆 not in the slightest, barely amused maybe but little more reaction than that to yet another stw thread that's rapidly becoming a slaning match
[i]I quoted from Wiki an introduction to the belief in Chakra as a spiritual idea. Do you disagree with its contents?[/i]
Chakra is not a spiritual idea as I undertsand it, so yes, I disagree pretty much completely with that Wiki entry.

[i]The vast majority of the soft-headed that pay for the more ridiculous kinds of quackery, are more often than not the most likely to benefit from the emotional component of any placebo effect[/i]

Interesting that you stoop to insults and derogatisations so easily 😉

Would your definition of soft-headed also include people who pay to use relationship counsellers, psychotherapists and life coaches ?
Or perhaps it would include people who 'believe' the high end tosh peddled by advertsing agencies on behalf of health damaging products.

Anyway, day job almost over and I'm not losing valuable snake-oil selling time to continue here......

its just a diference in language stoner.

TJ interesting comments on the acupuncture.
the reason i went for shiatsu was i felt the redistribution of energy thruoghout the sytem was better than just releasing the excess.
might give it ago.

I too have had definite physical effects from acupuncture. Real pain relief. Unfortunately it didn't last long enough for it to be useful- would have needed daily needling.

One of the things that often amuses me is the "its herbal so it has no side effects" arguement I so often hear. So there are no poisonous herbs and no conventional medicines derived from herbs then? No didn't think so.

Of course this is all anecdote but in response to:

hear from people who've received complementary therapy and found it lacking or mis-sold rather

It's not all good and it's not all bad, but it could be either.

As TJ said an open mind is what is needed.

One of my favourite sayings is "If you open your mind too much your brain will fall out" Seems quite apt here.

It would be perhaps more interesting to hear from people who've received complementary therapy and found it lacking

Okay then, I tried accupuncture once. It didn't work.

TJ, I hope that the closed minded comment didn't include me. I'm perfectly willing to change my mind on these things all that I ask is that the effects of "Alternative Medicine" be proven. Granted that means that it is no longer really Alternative but that's another matter.

I'd be more interested in hearing what would persuade a believer in such things to change their mind. In my experience it is the believers who are close minded, not the skeptics.

Gonefishing - not aimed at anyone in particular - there appeared to me to be some very closed minds on the thread and I can't be bothered to re read it to check if you were one.

Not intended to be offensive either

Read the OP and cba reading the rest.
One phrase springs to mind..."Pie in the sky".

Why on earth would you want to target students?

Oh, sorry, just re-read..."well to do students"!

8)

Sorry TJ that was a bit harsher than I intented. It's something that annoys me when I get accused of having a closed mind by people who refuse to accept a challenge to their "beliefs"

Nae worries. I didn't take it harshly

As pointed out above, if an alternative therapy is deemed to be effective then it ceases to be alternative and becomes [b]therapy[/b].

If some of these alternative therapies that have been used for "thousands of years" are truly beneficial, then surely there would be evidence of their efficacy over and above a placebo?

-This is not closed-mindedness.

Scientific knowledge increases incrementally and understanding increases with time, it does not decrease. A healer 2000 years ago may have observed some positive effects of some of their herbal potions. Further observation and refinement has resulted in the medical practice of today. This practice will change when more is learned/understood.

due to stagnation of energy so just give it a bit of a shove.

hehehe this thread gets more entertaining by the hour. 🙂 I dont know whether to laugh or cry!

coffeeking having sorted a nasty illness i thought i might share with folks some of the stuff that seemed to work for me.
this was an ill guy with a very skeptical mindset.
turns out that a few of you are just nasty f*ckers though.*

*not crikey though as he said sorry.