#2908: Rebecca Goff

Craniosacral therapy is pseudo-religious quackery based on a number of fundamental errors about human anatomy and lots of murky New Age fluff about life energies and vibrations – indeed, even among quack therapies it stands out as a particularly wildly nonsensical one. But how would you go about taking such New Age delirium even further down into the rabbit hole of pink warm fluffy phantasms? Well, you could of course augment craniosacral therapy with some other stock New Age silliness, such as … dolphins. Oh, yes: Say hello to AquaCranialtherapy®, an “advanced modality, [that] is a mix of osteopathic based cranial sacral moves, dolphin therapy movements, and visionary emotional release work developed through years of cetacean research”. In particular, AquaCranial therapy’s “extremely light touch decompresses the spine, cranium and other areas of bone and tissue. This balancing of the CranioSacral System eliminates physical stresses from the body acquired throughout a lifetime.” If you were looking for testable hypotheses or even statements that make sense when you spend a second to think about them, you’re thinking about this the wrong way.

 

The therapy in question was developed by Rebecca Goff of Maui – a “licensed massage therapist” and “certified marine-mammal naturalist” (that would be a 4-week holiday designated as a “course”, and which promises “fun and exciting stories to tell their friends and families about a one-of-a-kind experience”) – by “combining lessons learned from studying the behavior and movement of dolphins and whales with CranioSacral Therapy” – in other words, by trying to produce insights about human anatomy (in particular human skull sutures) by looking at whale behavior from a distance and trying to draw analogies to a model of human anatomy that would be considered stunningly obsolete even by 19th century phrenologists.

 

Goff, who according to herself is “on the cutting edge of Cetacean Therapy Research and one of of the most experienced people today in the field of Aquatic Biomagnetic Healing”, has more to tell us about the therapy, but we won’t bother since it’s challenging to find anything suitable for putting into grammatical sentences in the pastel-colored fluffy nonsense she produces. Nor does it really matter; Goff’s AquaCranial Therapy is one of the novelties offered (or at least used to be offered) at the Four Seasons Resort & Spa on Maui along with Ayurvedic massage, Thai massage, Hawaiian temple lomilomi and outdoor adventure activities. It’s a White Lotus spa treatment for real-life White Lotus travellers, with gentle massages in warm waters in tropical environments; it’s probably lovely and completely beyond our price range.

 

Diagnosis: On the surface, at least, it is probably harmless, but Goff might be a true believer or get it into her head that what she does could offer real help for real people in real difficult situations (she seems to suggest that some of what she does could assist with homebirths, for instance) – and then things could quickly get ugly.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence