Provocative Therapy

‘Laughter Yoga’ and Provocative Therapy

A major article in The New Yorker profiles the life and work of ‘The Laughing Guru’ Madan Kataria. There is little doubt that laughter is good for our health but is there more to it than ‘laughing for no reason’. In Provocative Therapy, patients may indeed laugh at the absurd remarks of the therapist, but they are also provoked into coming up with their own solutions to their problems. Read more »


‘LAUGHERCISE’: More evidence for the Health Benefits of Laughter.

More evidence for the therapeutic benefits of laughter. Read more »


Reverse Psychology in Advertising Campaign

One of the central tenets of Provocative Therapy is that people don’t like being told what to do. This is probably due to the fact that we often perceive advice (even when well meant) to be patronising and condescending. Thus Provocative Therapists utilise a variety of specially designed tools that use clinical reverse psychology to [...] Read more »


Surprise! Surprise! Stress can cause heart attacks!

In a discovery of cosmic significance, it has just been proved scientifically that men are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes after enduring great stress. Didn’t we already know this? Apparently not. Let me explain…
Organisations such as the British Heart Foundation (BHF) have until now claimed that ‘there is no evidence to [...] Read more »


The Disappearance of the G-spot

In the history of anatomy, it is an extremely rare occurrence for a part of the body to be declared not to exist. Yet this week the Journal of Sexual Medicine will publish an article that claims that the ‘idea of a G-spot is subjective’ – which means that the much written and chattered about [...] Read more »


2010: Will irony will show us the way?

Meditating on the decade that was, the words of the poet W.H. Auden came to mind:

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to [...] Read more »


The Pie gets more emphatic!

The Pie Man has the noble duty of delivering this pie chart to those who jeer at homeopathy and CAM because they consider them to be less than evidence-based. In the name of truth and beauty*, the Pie Man attempts to make it clear that most of common conventional medical interventions are far from evidence-based [...] Read more »


Of Rats and Junk Food Junkies

It’s official. Junk food is almost as addictive as heroin! And no I’m not being provocative just for the hell of it. (Provocative therapists should never be gratuitously provocative.) No, the men in the white coats with bad news this time are neurobiologists, Dr Paul Johnson and Dr Paul Kenny. The Daily Telegraph reports today [...] Read more »


Good News for Men: Fast cars are good for your health!

People love to mock men who  buy Porches when they enter middle age. Common ways of belittling these guys is to mutter things like ‘mid-life crisis’ or ‘male menopause’. Well it turns out that fast cars, especially fast red cars really are good for the health of middle-aged men!
There is now evidence for this and [...] Read more »


Could sperm be the secret elixir of eternal youth?
With more and more talk of prolonging life to 100 and beyond, doctors may feel under increasing pressure to be able to deliver what the media promise. Clerics are in trouble too: Why talk eschatologically about life after death when it might be possible to live forever [...] Read more »