The
Future of The Alexander Technique - What Next?
This website was
originally set up by a group of
teachers concerned about what regulation and the CNHC will mean for the
future of the Alexander Technique, and the future of the Society of
Teachers of the Alexander Technique.
The debate has now
taken place and the site is currently being maintained by Mike
Rawlinson, Independent Alexander Teacher
Prince’s
Foundation for Integrated Health Shut Down After Fraud Investigation
Although
the CNHC has so far received little interest from the press, that
changed a few weeks ago when it emerged that the Prince's Trust was
to be shut down following criminal investigations of fraud and money laundering.
The news was widely
reported and of course the anti-alternative medicine lobby had a field
day. The news broke only days before the general election otherwise it
would probably have been broadcast more widely.
You can
read the reports by clicking the following links
BBC
News - The
Times - The
Guardian - The
Independent - The
Mail
Given
that the Prince's Trust started this whole regulation debacle by
founding the CNHC, it is
difficult to see how being associated with alternative medicine and the
CNHC is going to enhance our professional standing.
The Writing on the Wall
A few years ago, clinical trials established that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was effective in treating depression, and it became available on the NHS. Not surprisingly the NHS uses therapists trained on short courses, and as if this wasn't bad enough, NICE (The National Institute for Clinical Excellence) now recommends dispensing with therapists altogether and delivering
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for depression by computer in place of a therapist! You can read the full story in
The Independent.
A few years ago, clinical trials established that The Alexander Technique was effective in treating low back pain..........
CNHC
Register Latest
After almost five months of the
register being open to Alexander Teachers, 97% of STAT
members have not joined the CNHC !
Since the CNHC register
opened to Alexander Teachers on January 4th, only 26 STAT members have
joined the register, and of these, almost half are current or former council
members, or were directly involved with regulation. There are about twice as
many non STAT trained teachers on the register from ITM and PAAT. Two Thirds of 'Alexander
Teachers' on the CNHC register trained on one weekend a month, or
part-time evening and weekend training courses!
We have to question whether
it was worth all the strife and division in our Society to engage in a
process from which we have so much to lose with no discernible benefits, in
order to appease such a tiny minority of our members.
We are not classed as a
therapy..!
Just to allay any fears that
the CNHC might see our work as a therapy, we copied this item, which was
added to their website in April
"Alexander Technique & Bowen Therapy
For information on Alexander
Technique and Bowen Therapy, the contents of a typical therapy session
and which conditions these therapies may help..............."
Do the CNHC not understand
the difference between teaching and therapy, or do they have a different
agenda?
Latest News on 'Voluntary'
Regulation
According to a press
release dated 1st April from the Department of Health Next
steps for complementary therapy, practitioners of herbalism,
acupuncture, and Chinese Medicine, (after waiting several years for the
government to come up with the statutory regulation they need and were
promised), are now to be compelled to register with
the CNHC. The reasons are probably political as this will save the
government from having to bother to go ahead with statutory regulation
for these therapies, and will ensure a huge increase in members and a
corresponding increase in income for the CNHC. thus saving the government
from having to bail it out.
From the point of view
of the CNHC this is excellent news because compelling some therapies to
register is the first step to compulsory regulation for all of us. And
as if this was not bad enough, herbalists have been told "off the
record" that they were going to become "statutorily regulated"
under the CNHC. What this means is unclear, except perhaps that the CNHC will say
anything to anyone to get them to sign up.
Fortunately early
indications are that no one is falling for that one!
Read
the DoH press release here
More news on this
topic soon.......

So why did we go
through all this hassle?
Government Plans to Regulate
Psychotherapists and Counsellors
After three years of
consultations the government (through the HPA) have published their Draft
Standards of Proficiency for Psychotherapy and Counselling. Note the relevance
of these standards
The Standards dictate that
practitioners should:
- know how to operate equipment and minimise the risk of infection.
- know how to select appropriate hazard control and risk management,
reduction or elimination techniques.
- have a knowledge of health, disease, disorder and dysfunction.
- be able to evaluate and implement intervention plans using recognised
outcome measures.
- know how to use protective equipment.
- know how to formulate and deliver plans and strategies for meeting health
and social care needs.
- understand the principles of quality control and quality assurance and
conduct audits correspondingly.
- maintain an effective audit trail, participate in audit procedures and
work towards continued improvement.
- be able to formulate specific and appropriate management plans
including the setting of timescales.
- demonstrate a logical and systematic approach to problem solving and be
able to initiate problem solving techniques.
- observe and record client's responses.
-be able to demonstrate effective and appropriate skills in communicating
information, advice and instruction.
- understand the need to engage service users and carers in planning and
evaluating the diagnostics, treatment and interventions to meet their needs
and goals.
And just in case you find some
of this
hard to believe, here is the link
http://www.psyreg.co.uk/
Quite apart from the fact that
much of it is meaningless waffle, little of it is remotely relevant to the work
done by psychotherapists. Do we really want to get ourselves mixed
up in this kind of nonsense?
CNHC Fiddles the Figures
(Again!)
In case you didn't read
the piece on the original petition site, the CNHC has been accused of
lying about the number of registrants it has read
here
By mid February the CNHC website
claimed that it had 2000 therapists registered, although independent
searches of the register indicate that the figure was more like 1600 -
1700. The higher figure seems to have been achieved by counting the number of
masseurs and the number of reflexologists etc separately, although a fair
number of therapists practice both. And there are
some duplicate entries too. The latest independent figure s for CNHC
membership (July 15th 2010) indicate that there are 2729 registrants in
total
And the latest news
from the CNHC website is that the register will soon be open to healers
(didn't FM have something to say about healers?) and Cranial Sacral
Therapy. It doesn't inspire a lot of confidence when the regulatory body
doesn't appear to even know how to spell the name of the therapies it is
regulating! (In case anyone from CNHC is reading this it's Cranio
Sacral Therapy).

CNHC are getting so
desperate they are now contacting therapists directly by email to invite
them to join up.
What The papers Say
Well very little
actually - (until recently - see separate item at the top of the page). The CNHC issues regular press releases that they publish on
their website but we are not aware of any newspaper ever having
published any of them. We have searched the on line editions of all
major newspapers for any mention at all of the CNHC: the Independent
hasn’t mentioned it, nor has the Daily Mail, and neither has the
Telegraph. The Times gives it the briefest mention at the end of an
article about medical misconduct, and it is left to the Guardian (a
newspaper that recently printed a very positive feature about ex STAT
head of training Jeanne Day) to give the public the 'facts' about the CNHC.
Which it does in a lengthy and utterly
scathing article titled.
False Assurances
"The complementary and Natural
Healthcare Council's claims to regulate alternative medicine are
misleading and dangerous"
And it continues............
‘The
history of the CNHC reads like that of a government body in a banana
republic….Is all this then just a farce, a waste of money and an
exercise to please Prince Charles? No, I'm afraid it is worse than that.
……the CNHC, probably for the first time in the history of the NHS,
firmly establishes double standards in British medicine.’
You
can read the whole article here.
The Sun
has reported on the CNHC - Not surprisingly a vitriolic attack on
alternative therapy, which affects all disciplines on the register read
here
Voluntary Registration?
Of course we can all be
assured that registration with the CNHC is voluntary, but voluntary can
mean different things to different people. Here is what Maggie Dunn,
Chair of the CNHC said in a BBC interview under the heading
'The head of the
UK's first regulator for complementary medicine has promised to get
tough with the industry'
"As applying to the register is
voluntary, Ms Dunn accepted that some therapists might not put
themselves forward. But she said they would be found out in the end as
"within a year or so" customers will be looking to only use
therapists who have met the regulator's standards."
So those of us who
don't sign up will be 'found out' by Ofquack!
This isn't quite what
some of us understand by voluntary, and since when were we part of an
industry, and how will the CNHC 'get tough' with us, and what will
happen when we are 'found out'?
Read
the BBC Interview here
* * *
|