Would you mind explaining why you think Somatics works? That >=3 people on LW take it seriously certainly lends some credibility, but as far as I can see there’s not much else to recommend it. I’m genuinely curious what convinced you, since this seems potentially useful.
Nor does their official website provide any convincing evidence.
Edit: This is a review of 6 Feldenkrais RCTs, and concludes:
[The six studies] were all burdened with significant methodological weaknesses. … All but one trial reported positive results. Conclusion: The evidence for the FM is encouraging but, due to the paucity and low quality of studies, by no means compelling.
Would you mind explaining why you think Somatics works?
I hold my beliefs on the subject mainly because of things I have seen with my own eyes and experiences I made. I spent years in standard physiotherapy. As part of my QS regiment I measured my lung function daily. After a 20 minute intervention at a bar by a practitioner of somatic psycho-education I woke up the next day with an 50% increase in my lung function. At that time that wasn’t permanent but after 4 months of weekly session I stabilized on that new value. Specific improvements in that timeframe often happen right the day after a session.
Hard QS numbers where what hooked me initially. Then as time went on things got more complicated. I started perceiving a lot more. I made a lot of experiences but they don’t fit into a structure. Today I could spent 5 minutes to describe you how my body feels and I don’t really have a way to compress that into a decent number that I could track. This means that studying the subject via the scientific method is very hard.
There are a bunch of things I perceive which I can’t measure with any method I could think of and where I’m not calibrated and therefore I can’t tell whether the variable actually changes or my perception of the variable changes.
For example at the start of this week my physical perception increased. Practically that means that I can dance a Salsa turn pattern comfortably at my Salsa lessons with eyes closed. At the same time my increased perception comes with slight nausea I can perceive and I get diarrhea. But overall I feel more comfortable.
If I would use some random checklist than I would mark nausea as something negative. But I do thing the problem was there before and it’s just my increased awareness that brought it to the forefront.
If you study something like back pain, we don’t have good objective methods to measure back pain. The standard is to ask people and when your primary modus operandi is about using changing in perception as a means to get results that’s problematic.
We have X-rays to diagnose the shape of bones but we don’t have similar high powered equipment to measure the amount of contraction of all the muscles in the body and have standardized that equipment to be useful for diagnosis of illnesses that have to do with contraction of muscles that don’t relax themselves when they should relax themselves.
A Feldenkrais practitioner might say: “Hey you have this muscle in your back and is tense. If that muscle would be relaxed your back would feel better. I can teach you to relax it.” That seems like the kind of question that should be easy to investigate scientifically. You would just need an objective measurement for whether the muscle is tense. Unfortunately we don’t have this for clinical practice. Scientific discovery has a lot do to with having good tools.
I have a friend who writes a software that uses the kinect for analysing movement patterns to study another physical therapy. It’s hard to get academic funding for it. In biology there a lot of money for buying fancy fMRI’s and gene sequencing equipment. There not much money for buying good camera’s and software to analyse movement patterns of humans so she has to repurpose closed source gaming hardware. There’s nobody spending the millions to get an open source solution that’s optimised for the needs of researchers of human movement. Such tools might be a better target than telomere research for someone who wants to found the fight against aging.
I don’t capitalize the term somatics because it’s a field that contains many methods. I do think that the book of Thomas Hanna is good but I don’t specifically endorse Hanna Somatic Education over another brand like Feldenkrais. Thomas Hanna unfortunately died in a car crash so his trademarked method isn’t as strong as it would have been if he would have spent another two decades in research.
Would you mind explaining why you think Somatics works? That >=3 people on LW take it seriously certainly lends some credibility, but as far as I can see there’s not much else to recommend it. I’m genuinely curious what convinced you, since this seems potentially useful.
Looking at the Wikipedia pages on Somatics and on sensory-motor amnesia, I see no significant evidence that this actually works.
Nor does their official website provide any convincing evidence.
Edit: This is a review of 6 Feldenkrais RCTs, and concludes:
I hold my beliefs on the subject mainly because of things I have seen with my own eyes and experiences I made. I spent years in standard physiotherapy. As part of my QS regiment I measured my lung function daily. After a 20 minute intervention at a bar by a practitioner of somatic psycho-education I woke up the next day with an 50% increase in my lung function. At that time that wasn’t permanent but after 4 months of weekly session I stabilized on that new value. Specific improvements in that timeframe often happen right the day after a session.
Hard QS numbers where what hooked me initially. Then as time went on things got more complicated. I started perceiving a lot more. I made a lot of experiences but they don’t fit into a structure. Today I could spent 5 minutes to describe you how my body feels and I don’t really have a way to compress that into a decent number that I could track. This means that studying the subject via the scientific method is very hard.
There are a bunch of things I perceive which I can’t measure with any method I could think of and where I’m not calibrated and therefore I can’t tell whether the variable actually changes or my perception of the variable changes.
For example at the start of this week my physical perception increased. Practically that means that I can dance a Salsa turn pattern comfortably at my Salsa lessons with eyes closed. At the same time my increased perception comes with slight nausea I can perceive and I get diarrhea. But overall I feel more comfortable.
If I would use some random checklist than I would mark nausea as something negative. But I do thing the problem was there before and it’s just my increased awareness that brought it to the forefront.
If you study something like back pain, we don’t have good objective methods to measure back pain. The standard is to ask people and when your primary modus operandi is about using changing in perception as a means to get results that’s problematic.
We have X-rays to diagnose the shape of bones but we don’t have similar high powered equipment to measure the amount of contraction of all the muscles in the body and have standardized that equipment to be useful for diagnosis of illnesses that have to do with contraction of muscles that don’t relax themselves when they should relax themselves.
A Feldenkrais practitioner might say: “Hey you have this muscle in your back and is tense. If that muscle would be relaxed your back would feel better. I can teach you to relax it.” That seems like the kind of question that should be easy to investigate scientifically. You would just need an objective measurement for whether the muscle is tense. Unfortunately we don’t have this for clinical practice. Scientific discovery has a lot do to with having good tools.
I have a friend who writes a software that uses the kinect for analysing movement patterns to study another physical therapy. It’s hard to get academic funding for it. In biology there a lot of money for buying fancy fMRI’s and gene sequencing equipment. There not much money for buying good camera’s and software to analyse movement patterns of humans so she has to repurpose closed source gaming hardware. There’s nobody spending the millions to get an open source solution that’s optimised for the needs of researchers of human movement. Such tools might be a better target than telomere research for someone who wants to found the fight against aging.
I don’t capitalize the term somatics because it’s a field that contains many methods. I do think that the book of Thomas Hanna is good but I don’t specifically endorse Hanna Somatic Education over another brand like Feldenkrais. Thomas Hanna unfortunately died in a car crash so his trademarked method isn’t as strong as it would have been if he would have spent another two decades in research.