The environment of over-information that constitutes the Internet causes ideas, theories and proposals of dubious effectiveness to proliferate and multiply. Furthermore, charlatans, false psychologists and characters with delusions of spiritual redemption have found a way to spread their conception of mental health, seriously endangering people’s health. How do you recognize a charlatan when you see him? Going through the immense number of web pages dedicated to supposed revolutionary theories, we have detected the 6 most common phrases used by them:
1. “I don’t treat diseases, I treat people’s well-being”
The popular belief has spread that diseases are caused by medical science, and worse still, that the goal of medicine is to keep people sick. Historical episodes such as the bubonic plague in Europe or the smallpox epidemic that almost wiped out the Aztecs upon the arrival of the Spanish are conveniently forgotten by the promoters of this idea. Some more literate charlatans cite two or three references by Focault to claim that medicine kills, and that, since they are not doctors, they do not kill. This argument is just as valid as ensuring that tobacco does not kill, because it is natural.
2. “To cure the disease, the body and soul must be healed”
The body-soul duality belongs to the field of philosophy. For the Health Sciences, it is more than clear that biological functions are the support of mental functions, and that these are dependent on the former. Similarly, we know that mental functions can trigger biological processes in a double feedback system. This system involves chemical-electrical communication between neurological, immunological and endocrine entities through chemical axes and reception-action networks. This interaction does not allow cause-effect analysis, but rather cyclization. That is, a psychological event triggers a biological event, but that psychological event could have occurred because a previous biological event allowed it. Since this system is too complex for charlatans, it is easier to resort to soul and other entities to which all kinds of powers can be attributed without further explanation other than “energies”.
3. “You will heal if it is your time to heal, I cannot contravene universal laws”
The notion of universal laws, eternal rules, natural axioms, cosmic information and other unrelated concepts have become particularly popular, and have been irresponsibly spread on television and film, treating them as true, unquestionable and absolute. The level of acceptance that they have provoked reaches levels of fanaticism, especially because it is enough to review these ideas a little to realize that they have the same foundation as any other esotericism. Linked to these ideas, we have chosen to use the notion of healing, which is usually defined in a similar way to nirvana. What happens when we base a therapeutic process on an esoteric action? Nothing. From there it is given to the time the ultimate power to decide the patient’s health status. These charlatans are like the King in The Little Prince, who claimed that the entire universe obeyed him. When The Little Prince asks the King for proof of such magnificent power, the King asks the sun “Sun, set!” As the sun did not set, The Little Prince questioned the King, “Why doesn’t the sun obey you?” to which the King responds, “you will obey me when the time is right.”
4. “I do not use files or studies, because I deal with the vital present, not the past.”
Many pseudopsychology movements, or fallacious incursions of non-clinical psychologies in the field of health, are characterized by an absolute dismissal of the methods of collecting and monitoring clinical information, with the pretext that what matters to a patient is their current well-being and not their past problems. Therefore, clinical histories, progress notes, and hereditary-family history are ignored, hoping that this will have some kind of therapeutic effect, since “if something is not remembered, it is as if it had not existed.” For a charlatan, devoting time to the exercise of collecting, analyzing and describing clinical information is a waste of time, and an act that contravenes health care laws in almost all countries.
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5. “After the session, don’t try to think about what happened, the treatment will do its job at the right time,” or “For this to work, you have to stop thinking and start feeling.”
Critical thinking is the great enemy of charlatans, which is why they usually manipulate their patients by inducing the idea that thinking is bad, or simply harmful to the treatment. In this way we have come across pseudotherapies that ensure that their action process is so deep and personal that if the person tries to understand or explain what happened, the effect is simply lost. This is very similar to the myth of the man who always knew which lottery number would be the winner, only that if he told someone or made use of that knowledge, at that moment the winning number would change to another. All patients have the right to a second opinion, to informed consent and to ask as many questions as are necessary to understand the treatment in which they are intended to be involved.
6. “If it didn’t work, it’s because you didn’t follow the treatment properly.”
Finally, we find that the treatments promoted by charlatans have a 100% guarantee of effectiveness, only for one very small detail: they depend on each and every step being followed to the letter with surgical precision, otherwise Otherwise the treatment fails. This is totally opposite to the simplicity and clarity with which they explain the causes of a condition. On the contrary, many pseudo-psychological treatments resort to explanations of their functioning that are so complicated that not even their promoters know how to explain them clearly. Just as in the Middle Ages the phenomena of static electricity were so spectacular that alchemists used them to astonish the masses, today we come across false therapists who resort to branches of science such as quantum mechanics, string theory, alleles genomics, and even prions to “scientifically substantiate” their treatments, and the reason for their “complexity.”
If you are a patient and you hear one of these phrases, or paraphrases of them, from a self-proclaimed professional, it is virtually certain that he is a charlatan. If you are a psychologist and are looking for new horizons of specialization, pay attention to the phrases that promote the therapy of your interest to avoid falling into fallacious incursions of psychological theories in the clinical environment.
Article previously published in and provided for publication in by its author.
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