Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Chapman's Reflexes and Semiotics

On her blog the Healing Presence, Kate Sciandra posted about the juxtaposition of metaphors in "the healing presence". I totally agree that we have great systems forfooling ourselves into thinking we have more "knowing", more control, than we actually do." Clients come to me for stress reduction, often complaining that their stress is mental. It is only once I start to work with them or probe deeper in questions that they remember where they notice it in relation to the rest of their body. As part of my Practitioner training program, I attended a class with Morel Stackhouse about Chapman's system of reflex points. The most striking part of the class was that she commented though we know where these points are located, we don't really know what they do to the body.

For those not familiar, Frank Chapman was an early-20th century osteopath who described a pattern of points which corresponded to various ailments/disorders. Dr. Charles Owens continued Dr. Chapman's work and subsequently documented some of the patterns into a book, "An Endocrine Interpretation of Chapman's Reflexes" .
As Kate stated in her post, "The map is not the territory" and this seemed to be especially true with my experience with this class. It is my understanding that Luann Overmyer conducted a study working with selected Chapman's points, which was discontinued due to a tremendous and overwhelmingly negative response to the work performed. As told to me, the clients all chose to discontinue treatment of their Chapman's points, since they became ill or at least uncomfortable.

The lesson that I took away from Morel's class was acknowledge the existence of Chapman's points as a system, with no expectation of using it for diagnosis (outside of our scope of practice) or for treatment (We don't really know what the result is of treatment of Chapman's points).
Another example of "the more we know, the less we know".

No comments:

Subscribe Now