New! Awesome! Better! (Learning a new approach)

With all the attention being given to cognitive functional therapy (and deservedly so, IMHO) it’s tempting to leap aboard the modality train and go take a course, isn’t it? Although I’ve picked on CFT today, it could just as easily have been any of the New! Awesome! Better! therapies that hit the clinical headlines on a frequent basis. The temptation to go “Look! Shiny!” and learn about the latest thing isn’t confined to teenagers following some social media trend. Yup, even sober-sides nearly 60-year-olds like me still want to go on learning, getting better at what I do, keeping up with what’s popular… And yet I worry just a tad when I see the number of therapies that have kicked off with a hiss and a roar but later don’t seem nearly as promising as they did when they started. Why is that? What am I worrying about? New ideas can often get picked up without critique, as if a new idea comes fully birthed and complete. The slow decades of development, the theory that underpins an approach, and the careful ways researchers couch their conclusions can be completely ignored in the rush to show that ‘I’m up-to-date’ – and that’s a problem. Why? Because while a hallmark of an expert is in describing complex concepts in a very simple way, when we learn a new therapy we are most certainly not expert. So we’re likely to pick up on superficial and relatively black and white ideas, but fai...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Clinical reasoning Education/CME Occupational therapy Physiotherapy Professional topics Psychology Research Science in practice biopsychosocial healthcare Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs