The Octopus questions and wonders about everything
announcements, invitations, and an exploration of how we know what we know
Preliminaries:
1. If you’re interested in my (slightly more than) occasional in-person classes in Kalamazoo, I encourage you to sign up for the Unwindings mailing list (scroll down almost to the bottom of the page to find the signup form). That list is very un-salesy and infrequent, with just short announcements for classes—mine as well as those of a couple of my like-minded collaborators. I don’t always remember to announce my classes here, but they’re always announced on the Unwindings list.
2. Do you want a medical massage in southwest Michigan? My massage school, the Integrative Health Sciences Institute, in Plainwell, Michigan, offers student medical massages at a discounted rate. In contrast to the standard relaxation massage (which is lovely, I’ll hasten to say), medical massage targets pain and inflammation stemming from injuries, poor posture (like being hunched over a device all day), or chronic stress.
I’m at the point of my education where I’m starting to be able to do actual treatments in our clinic, which is fascinating. My dad came in last week and was my first almost-solo client (I got to work on him, with my teacher supervising and answering a few questions while I treated him). When he came over yesterday with donuts for the kids, I asked him how he felt after the massage. He was really pleased because the work I did made his chronic neck pain feel much, much better. Hooray! It’s really exciting to be able to know that I made a difference, and to see the impact of what I’m learning in class. (Thanks Dad!)
If you’d like to give it a try, you can visit the clinic website for more info, including the clinic phone number to schedule an appointment. Alternately, you can send me an email (adrienne@soilandsunshine.com) and I can put you on our schedule.
3. I’ll be hosting a Wellness Brunch on July 16th, at 11:30am in Kalamazoo. While we eat, I’ll be talking about various aspects of wellness and, more importantly, answering your questions and helping your troubleshoot your particular situation. Email me (adrienne@soilandsunshine.com) to sign up, or for more information.
I took a philosophy class in college, lo these long years ago, on theories of knowledge—how we know what we know. There’s a lot that I’ve forgotten about that class. I have vague memories about different interpretations about how we know that we even exist, that we aren’t a ‘brain in a vat’ just dreaming of the world and everything in it. A precursor to the Matrix, really.
Later, I read Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder, both on my own and then later with my kids as part of their homeschooling. Gaarder’s book is a fictional exploration of the history of philosophical though, with enough of a story to it to make it compelling. My kids and I all really enjoyed the combination of teaching and story. Again, Gaarder touched on this question of how do we know what we know.
It’s come up again as I circle around in the world of health and wellness, but with much more significance. It was all somewhat theoretical, when I’d thought about it in the past.
Take the pandemic, for example. We had our own experiences, we heard about the experiences of others. People had opinions and things to say. What was true? What was fact? What did we know and where were we ignorant? Who did we trust to have knowledge to compensate for our ignorance?
Just because someone had a theory about how the virus was transmitted, or its virulence, didn’t mean that that theory was accurate.
How do we know what we know? How can we be confident that it's accurate, that it is a faithful representation of reality and not just some story that someone's come up with that sounds good?
I keep coming back to middle school and the scientific method: Observe. Research what other people have found about what you've observed. Make a hypothesis/ask a question. Run a test or experiment. Draw a conclusion about your results. Explore how your conclusion fits in with more observations and the work of others.
I might not be doing major original research, but I'm making observations all the time, and I'm doing small things and seeing how they turn out. How do I feel when I eat wheat versus when I don't? Or what does a client experience when I follow the medical massage protocol I'm learning?
On a larger scale, I can look at the work of other people with that same lens. Have researchers followed the rules for doing "good science?" Are they asking good questions, testing the right variables, drawing good conclusions?
Health and wellness is tricky to study, because it's difficult to control all the variables. If you test what happens when people eat less wheat, for example, other things come into play. People might be eating fewer calories overall, or eating fewer carbohydrates, or eating more rice, or eating more fat. Each of those variables will make a difference.
The early studies that showed the harmful effects of saturated fat included a particular type of saturated fat, trans fat. Because of later studies specific to trans fats, we know that trans fats are certainly harmful. So do those studies show that saturated fat in general is bad, or were they just early proof that trans fats are harmful?
How studies are designed is important, so that we know what we're looking at, and we know what conclusions we can draw.
Ultimately, though, it's important that we keep coming back to this idea of how we know what we know. The infinite scroll of headlines doesn't give us a lot of context for what we're told. It's on us take a closer look, to not assume that something is true just because someone says it is. To look at where they got the idea from and trace it back to its source. To question, and to wonder.