🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan11.181752.6816@cs.unca.edu> kepley@photon.phys.unca.edu (Brad Kepley) writes:

>>[referring to ritual satanic abuse therapy and its skeptics]

>I think we better be careful that we don't just begin a new witchhunt with
>the therapists as target.  If these "memories" are not real, the therapist
>may be unwittingly providing the opportunity for these people to fantasize,
>but that doesn't necessarily mean they are "causing" the "memories".  

Maybe some sort of hunt is exactly what we need. We have an entire 
profession offering health-related services without a solid science
to back them up and without any good evidence to show greater than
placebo-level effects of their therapy. Class after diagnostic 
class of their prospective patients have been stripped away from 
them, as hard sciences have produced effective therapies for 
some conditions, and explanations of why psycho-therapy could not 
possibly address the problems in other conditions.

Yet we still have therapists being funded by government and insurance
money, paid in proportion to their educational level (without evidence
that the therapists' education has any favorable effect on patients).
And a group of such therapists have just invented an (unfalsifiable) 
grand conspiracy theory to open up a huge new group of patients in 
need of their "therapies."

For a man-in-the-street to provide someone an opportunity to fantasize
is fine. For a "health professional" to do that with my tax or insurance
dollars is another matter. For him to do that with a patient's own 
dollars is just as bad.