And now facilitated communication is the fad for pets. I can’t help but roll my eyes at the idiots that think their dogs and cats are actually sorting through dozens of buttons to express abstract concepts.
Good grief. I already knew acupuncture and chiropractic were being inflicted on animals ( I mean on other animals in addition to humans). Can these freaks keep their woo away from the innocent critters?
But, hey, if they can get a couple of dogs together without the human and have them use a ouija board, then that should be legitimate.
I can’t help but think this is a deliberate effort on the part of cats and dogs to avoid being eaten by migrants. “If they know we’re intelligent they won’t eat us. Vote for Trump in 2024.”
Not funny.
(Anecdote ahead)
I’m not a big fan of chiropractic. In fact, I have never gone to one and probably never will. I figure most of it is the placebo effect. However my dog was having some obvious pain in his hindquarters. He started yipping in pain when jumping for a ball, and then had trouble jumping up into the car. This was helped somewhat by cutting back on vigorous exercise.
Then he started being in obvious pain when lying down. So off to the vet we go.
She asked if she could do some chiropractic treatment (the clinic does do some "alternative’ therapies in addition to regular vet stuff) We said, sure, go for it (expecting to leave with some regular dog pain/anti inflammatory medication anyway). She went down his spine until he went “YIP!”. He jumped off the table and has not has a problem in 6 months since. No medication. No placebo effect.
There’s a significant placebo effect in almost every medical practice. I will agree it’s more so with chiropractic. I will point out that chiropractors are good at relieving and helping to prevent back pain of some forms. I’ll also note that their doctrine is based on a belief that virtually all disorders can be cured through chiropractic procedures although individually they run the gamut between useful but limited medical practitioners and outright quacks.
My own experience with chiropractors below. Basically in the end I believe they are good at muscular related back problems based on my experiences and statements from other doctors, yet still proceed with caution.
Summary
This started with a friend’s wacky wife who fell and injured her wrist while he was away. She needed someone to take her to chiropractor right away as she would not see any other kind of doctor. My wife went and picked her up, her usual chiropractor was not available so she went to see one very near my house. That chiropractor looked briefly at her wrist and told her to go to the hospital because it was broken, needed X-rays, and probably a cast, possibly more. So my impression of chiropractors immediately changed from ‘all quacks’ to ‘some of them may not be dangerous’.
A couple of years later I developed a problem in my back that I described as hook on a line pulling the upper part of my spine to the left. My PCP gave me muscle relaxers and said to take it easy for a few days. A few days later it grew more than uncomfortable and annoying into a dull but continuous ache. So I took a chance and went to see the chiropractor near my house. I described what was happening, I took my shirt off, he looked at my back for a few seconds, then he placed his finger on my back and said something like “I bet it hurts right here”. He had pinpointed the epicenter of the problem.
He had me lie down and he used some kind of ultrasonic heat thing on my back for a couple of minutes. Then he did some minor adjustments moving shoulders around some and pressing on my back in a few spots. It was only a few minutes but it was relieving some discomfort and my range of movement without any pain increased. He explained that there’s a lot of fibrous tissue in the back and it sometimes gets hooked over bony parts of the spine or just gets irritated somehow and he was mainly using simple massage techniques.
Then as an example of other techniques he did that think where he pulls and twists my head that sort of makes something pop and that relieved some stress. He told me I could become a patient and he’d do all the ‘cool stuff’ chiropractic patients want if I was interested, or I could also just see him for ordinary back pain like I had. A week later I could barely feel that hook pulling on my spine anymore and went in for a return visit. He used the ultrasonic thing again, a little more massage, and said I could come back in a week if I wanted but I should be fine by then and not need to see him again. He was right about that too.
A few years later I move here to Rhode Island and the same problem occurred. I went to see another chiropractor and he did a couple of sessions much the same way and that problem never returned. This guy was pretty deep into the chiropractic doctrine and suggested I see him for any medical problems I might have. I thanked him, never went to a chiropractor again.
Back to the main topic. I read the Times article back when it was first out, didn’t remember much and it’s paywalled now. But I did see from something about a Netflix documentary about this, “Tell them you love me”, and watched that last night. I was disgusted by the what happened now looking and hearing directly from the people involved.
There are forms of facilitated communication that don’t fall down this same rabbit hole. If you’ve seen Breaking Bad then you’ll recall the character Hector Salamanca who could not speak or do much else after a stroke except to press a button to sound a buzzer. In order to communicate someone had start going through the alphabet and he’d press the button when they got to the right letter. This is something that does work and it can be easily shown that anyone could have assisted Hector in spelling out words in this manner.
I wouldn’t doubt a person lacking ordinary communication ability could form a relationship with someone over a long period of time who could assist them in communication in various ways. The problem with this concept is easily seen where the facilitator almost immediately begins producing communication from someone who has never shown such ability before. And when the facilitation includes physical manipulation of their hands over a keyboard it is always suspect, and I’m sure always producing false results, intentionally or not.
It is very possible that the facilitator in the case covered in the documentary actually believed a young adult man was communicating with her, and that they formed a romantic relationship over time. She was and apparently still is mentally disturbed. Any objective observer could have demonstrated that that she was not facilitating communication from someone else, it all came from her own mind. This wasn’t a case of simple fraud or magical thinking, she raped a mentally incompetent man, destroyed her marriage over an imagined relationship. Again, I have to say I am disgusted.