Provocative Therapy
Health, Laughter and Contrarianism
There is little doubt that laughter is good for you. However when you are provoked to laugh at your ‘Inner Joke’, the funny side of how you are preventing yourself from being fulfilled in life, you get more than just the physiological benefits of laughter. You are nudged into changing your behavioural patterns for the better. This is the essence of Provocative Therapy the cutting edge in the use of contrarianism (reverse psychology) and humour in therapy. Read more »
The King’s Speech and Provocative Therapy
In the hit movie, The King’s Speech, the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, uses many of the tactics of Provocative Therapy to help King George VI deal with a speech impediment. Interestingly George VI was also treated by his homeopathic physician, Sir George Weir, who was knighted by his father, George V. Read more »
Homeopathy, Science, Scientism and Democracy
The attack on NHS homeopathy in this author’s opinion is an assault on liberty and democracy. I have made a small cartoon in order to make this point, illustrating the difference between science and scientism. The main point is that while medicine does need to be informed by science, it does not need to be fulfil the personal needs and beliefs of scientists. Read more »
‘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 [...] 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 »
