Verbal Self Defense!!

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gmattson
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Verbal Self Defense!!

Post by gmattson »

One of the reasons I was eager to have Suzette participate in our forums, was to evaluate how we, as martial artists, communicated. We put forth a thought or theory in what we consider to be an honest and straightforward manner. Another person, who disagrees, elects to do so in a manner that makes the poster feel threatened, so he counterattack. And so the 'thread' progresses or I should say, regresses.

Lets evaluate the following to see where we got off track. Did the initial poster word his message in a way that was dogmatic and preachy? Did the responder over react, inviting more counterattacking on a personal level?

How might the exchange be improved so that both the writers of the messages and the 'lurkers' might have learned something about the subject matter? Note: Suzette's busy schedule will only permit her to participate a couple times a week. However, she will respond to all questions. GEM


Note: Heavily edited content. The entire thread may be viewed on Evan Pantazi's forum: "Energetics and Martial Arts" (set your "show topics" to 20 days)
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<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Great Stuff Rich, thanks for the info. I'd like to add something to this from my own observations. While I have had some personal wellness and healing benefits from Qigong training and practice, as a psychologist I can assure you that any skeptic could make the argument that these things resulted from other "uncontrolled" factors and/ or from the "Hawthorne effect" or "Placebo" effect.

What actually gave me a renewed interest in this area was something I saw Rich do. No it wasn't his line movement demo. I have a female advanced black belt student who is in her mid 40's. She has a life long history of extremely low platelet count. The result of this is that she bruises very easily, and often gets bruises that simply never go away. She has a good number of bruises on her arms and legs that have been there over 20 years. At a Houston tuite seminar, she spent the first day practicing, and returned the second day covered with a mass of bruises for every place on her arms she had been touched the previous day. I had given her some dit dah jow linament, which is good for bruises to put on them.

Rich seeing her condition came over and said he give it a try to heal them. Now I thought this was gonna be him putting in some energy and that in a "few days" they would heal up. So did they heal from his energy or did they heal from just waiting a few days for them to go away.

Rich starts to do his thing, and right before our eyes the bruises began to disappear as he was putting in energy. Now here you can say that these bruises were relative superficial and that it is possible for the lady to have "willed" them away simply because she believed Rich could do this.

Well, not only did she think Rich was full of total crap (the lady works in a Medical School, and is a trained and registered Medical Technologist), but she didn't even put any trust in the linament I gave her.

She had not yet used the linament, but here was Rich removing her bruises. The the big one hit us. Rich didn't know the difference from her recent bruises and her chronic 20 year + bruises. So he proceeded to just treat them both the same, and both disappeared.

This woman had tried just about every kind of medical treatment to remove those chronic bruises, and nothing had ever worked. Medical experts in the field told her she was just going to have to live with them, they were permanent and nothing would take them away.

Rich returned those areas to normal skin color, no bruise discoloration whatsoever. And the best part, they didn't come back, they stayed healed.

Rich further "energized" the dit dah jow and she used it to remove even more bruises, both acute and chronic. Now that incident didn't meet the criteria of a controlled scientific study, but it did work, and nothing else worked, and nothing else could be contributed to the result. As a psychologist, I can assure you that it would take a lot more than a placebo or hawthorne effect to remove those chronic bruises, which even laser and cosmetic surgery procedures couldn't remove. It wasn't an imagined "lightening" of the bruised areas, it was total resolution of them. It wasn't a "temporary" reduction of capillary circulation, because they remained removed. One problem of the "scientific method" is that it can be fooled, another problem is that it isn't as "fool proof" as many hold it to be. It doesn't always give the right answer. That has been demonstrated too many times.

People have made incorrect correlations. And it is a simple fact that just because something only works on 40% of the population and not on 95%, doesn't mean it doesn't work, but that is what the scientific method would have you believe. Random occurrances happen, but some things that happen in small percentages aren't necessarily random, except in mathematics. Some of them are very inconsistent with all science as we know it, and their randomness is incompatible with the species in which they occur.

One of the reasons scientific method acknowledges the hypothesis occurring only in the high 90 percentiles. Truth is, that is the scientific method was "truly" flawless, it would occur in 100% of the trials. The method isn't flawless, and the experimenter acknowledges this by dealing with "statistically significant" figures rather than hard facts. There are more than a few things once thought to be 99 and 44/100 % true that are now considered to be totally false. Even if Qigong is 99% self delusion, if it actually makes you perform better as a martial artist to so delude yourself in that way, what have you got to loose?

Isn't , as they say, the major portion of the "game" is mental?

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The answer

Validity is a very subjective term. On the contrary, validity involves objectivity. This point seems ellusive to the practitioners of flim-flam. No matter, for the individual agreed to the objectivity of the double-blind studies. While he may find the results uncomfortable if not, given the above proclamations, a little embarassing, the reasons for proper studies is they allow the investigation of truth without subjective biases.

Indeed, long-winded claims must remain simply that: claims without evidence. Those who wish to accept claims without proper evidence are invited to contact the Administrator of this web page in order to purchase shares in the various large city bridges he "controls"--cash only, please.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


[This message has been edited by gmattson (edited February 02, 2000).]
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Verbal Self Defense!!

Post by ozarque »

It seems to me that the answers I've posted this morning (February 5th) to the other questions on the VSD forum probably apply to this question as well. I'm not going to add anything more at this time, therefore; I'll watch what you have to say over the coming week, and will welcome your questions and comments. Perhaps by the time I return next Saturday I'll have a more firm grasp of what constitutes a useful response.

Suzette
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