Welcome to my new podcast, Purves Versus! This short episode outlines why I have a podcast and the objectives I hope it will help achieve.
In future episodes we will discuss topics specific to our industry while exploring current trends, and evidence based content. I will be doing this through a series of solo episodes, but also I will be interviewing therapists from across the world. Some of our topics will include the value of mythbusting and I have interviews with those who use social media and other platforms to bust those myths. The new RMT experience, how did this prepare them for the real world of clinical practice, CEC providers, the educational experience going to school in an unregulated province, we will also explore modality empires and the role of professional associations and how they influence the profession and its various stakeholders.
Welcome to my new podcast, Purves Versus! This short episode outlines why I have a podcast and the objectives I hope it will help achieve.
In future episodes we will discuss topics specific to our industry while exploring current trends, and evidence based content. I will be doing this through a series of solo episodes, but also I will be interviewing therapists from across the world. Some of our topics will include the value of mythbusting and I have interviews with those who use social media and other platforms to bust those myths. The new RMT experience, how did this prepare them for the real world of clinical practice, CEC providers, the educational experience going to school in an unregulated province, we will also explore modality empires and the role of professional associations and how they influence the profession and its various stakeholders.
Hello everybody and welcome to Purvi versus I am Eric Purvis. This is the podcast for all massage manual and movement therapists. For those of you that don't know me, my objective is to educate, inspire, and advocate. For the musculoskeletal professions, particularly the profession of massage therapy, so we can provide higher value, meaningful care to the public through evidence-based principles, informed by best practices. Now, why am I doing another podcast? And what is this one about? This gonna make it different from others. Well, what I wanna do is in each episode I wanna discuss specific topics that are important to our industry, while also exploring current trends and evidence-based content. I'm gonna be doing this through a series of solo episodes, but also I will be interviewing therapists from across the world. Now, some of the topics which you will hear on this podcast are gonna include the value of Mythbusting. I have some interviews with those who use social media and other platforms to bust those myths. We're gonna explore the new R M T experience and how did this prepare them for the real world of clinical practice. I got a bunch of interviews with some C E C providers to. Uh, undercover. Why they do what they do and what they have to offer and why. Uh, the continuing education industry is the current best way to stay up to date with, uh, developments in the science and best practices of massage and manual therapy. I can also, uh, do an interview with somebody who was went to school in Unregulated province and explore what their educational experience was like for them. And we'll also have some discussions and some interviews with people on, uh, modality empires and the, also the role of professional associations and how these, uh, influence the profession and its various stakeholders. In this first episode, this is gonna be mostly and about me episode, just to give you guys that may not be familiar with me, uh, a little bit more about who I am and what I'm all about and why am I doing my own podcast. Uh, some of you might be familiar with me from my previous podcast, the Massage Therapist Development Initiative, which I did with my long. Um, time friend Jamie Johnson, and we decided to retire that one. Uh, this year after 29 episodes. We started at, I believe, during the covid lockdown as something to keep us busy and, and keep us, um, entertained, I guess, really while we were, you know, shut up in our houses. And, uh, we just found it more difficult as time went on to, to keep the. Uh, to get together to record episodes and to come up with content. Just as our lives got busy and our schedules got more difficult, uh, it just made sense just to, to retire it. Uh, and we had a great time, uh, doing that. Like I said, we had 29 episodes and, uh, it was, it was a lot of fun. This one though, this, uh, podcast, Purvi verses was something I actually came up with around the time of, of the Covid lockdown, it seemed. Then I was listening to a lot of podcasts and I thought to myself, you know what? I would like to have my own podcast out there. And, uh, I thought this, this title was, was, was interesting because I didn't want it to be pervi versus as a way of like me challenging or, or fighting against things. But I wanted it to be, uh, a platform for me to share my thoughts, my ideas, my feelings on a variety of, of different topics. Um, you know, I know where there's a podcast out there called science versus This name wasn't, uh, stolen from that. I actually. Didn't know that one existed until I brought up the idea for this one. And someone said, oh, your podcast is gonna be like Science first. And I thought, oh, crap. Uh, no. Um, but, uh, I, I, there is a similarity in the, in the title, uh, also too, what's nice with this title is people can actually hear how to, how to pronounce my last name. I have been called everything you can Imagine, uh uh, from with my last name. But the way it is actually pronounced is, Pervi, uh, I have responded to Pervs and Pervez and Pervis and Pervs of all kinds of different, uh, uh, ways of saying it. Uh, but Pervis is, is how my last name is pronounced. This is a question I get asked every single time from e everybody. How do you pronounce your last name? So anyway, people can listen to this podcast and hopefully they can, they can hear how to, how to say my name. Now what I, you know, what am I about and why do I do what I do? Well, it's a long story, but I'll try and make it quick, is I start, first started, uh, advocating and, and teaching, uh, and maybe a little bit of complaining at first, uh, about, uh, the, the state of the massage therapy profession, uh, probably close to 10 years ago. Because what was happening was I was, Finding information out there that was readily available if you just knew where to look. That really challenged every single thing that we are taught in our profession and every single thing that is advocated for by our stakeholders and by our professional associations and by our our schools, was. Actually, in some cases completely incorrect in some places, just misinformed. But I was finding that our profession had created this entire culture of beliefs and ideas and ways of viewing the human body in ways of treating people. That was actually quite inconsistent with, uh, basically all the literature that was out there. On pain and manual therapy and movement and exercise, and what I had learned in school and in my previous, uh, courses, like continuing education courses was this very patho, anatomical, very structural approach to care. And when I took these, this knowledge and these principles into my clinical practice, I found that they didn't really work very well and they didn't make any sense because what I was seeing in clinical practice was not represented by what I was had learned or what I was learning. And I initially thought, well, I just must be an idiot. I might not have any idea what I'm talking about. Maybe I just need to take more courses. So I kept chasing. You know, going in circles, taking more courses, trying to learn more things, and it still, things still didn't make sense with what I was seeing in the clinic. And then when you start to go online and just the, you know, things like Facebook started to, and Twitter and, uh, these other platforms started to explode. I found that I just, my, my knowledge base wasn't there. I didn't know what I needed to know. And it was taking, it, it was from taking a deep dive into the pain science literature that it really started to make sense to me that, you know, pain is more than just the state of a tissue. Uh, what we do with our, our hands is as a massage, a manual therapist is, is, is, has, is a piece of the puzzle of, of, of clinical practice. But it wasn't the be all and end all. And I, and I can't fix people with my hands regardless of how magical I wanted them to be. You know, this was a hard lesson to learn, and it was very difficult to accept that the way I'd been practicing or the things I had thought was not represented by what the literature was telling me. But with somebody with a science background, I had to. Decide that I could no longer just practice based on my beliefs, and I had to practice based on what the research was telling me. And so this, this led me to pursuing graduate studies, led me to, uh, getting my first teaching job with the, uh, on the education faculty with pain bc, and then led me to creating my own. Uh, educational, uh, business of teaching ConEd. Uh, and this is what, this was kind of a, what led me to where I am today, where I've been able to been fortunate enough to be able to, to, to, to research and to, to teach and to advocate for the profession of massage therapy primarily, but all musculoskeletal professions because, What the way things currently are in the profession are we're, we're behind and we, we aren't where we need to be. And podcasts and continuing education courses and blogs and social media engagement are, are my way of bringing information out to the public. Because what I learned early on was trying to change the stakeholders, trying to influence the colleges or the professional associations or all the schools, was kind of a, an exercise in futility where it didn't seem to matter what I was doing. Nothing. No one, people weren't listening or people didn't want to change, and they all stood around and pointed their fingers at each other and blamed each other for why things didn't change. And in my experience, what I've learned is that people do want to change. People do want to, you know, advocate for best practices. They do wanna update their curriculum. They do wanna update, you know, um, how things are are done in the profession, but the, it's a matter of will. And so what I've decided to do many years ago was by being an advocate and an educator to. Build a kind of a ground swell of, uh, of people that, that are knowledgeable and passionate and are advi or will advocate for change because it's through this collective group, uh, of hundreds or thousands of massage therapists that say, Hey, you know what? We want more. We want better. We're no longer gonna accept that, you know, we're, we're gonna pay $40,000 to go to school and learn content That is, 30, 40 years old, we are no longer going to accept taking courses that are based on beliefs in pseudoscience. We're gonna now start taking courses that are BA based on the on the best available science. And it's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of what I always like to say is less wrong information Nation. So that's what I want to give to you guys with this podcast is, is a variety of voices and a variety of information and stories that we can explore with various people on, with the focus always being on how can we make this profession better, what is it we can do to amongst ourselves in our communities and within our, our, our local clinics to, to, to be better and, and to really. Give the public what they deserve, which is higher quality care. Now for me, I enjoy challenging the status quo. It can be scary sometimes when you're going against industry norms, but this is what we need to do so the profession can move forward with science and provide better care. And this is what, cuz this is what the public needs and this is what the profession needs the public deserves to, to go. To see us and, and to get evidence-based care, evidence-based advice, communication that is supported, treatments that are supported, and maybe your treatment as a massage therapist, maybe at its at its least, it's just an analgesic. It maybe just makes people feel better. That's okay. You guys will probably hear me use the term touch people nicely as a, is a way to say, Hey, you know, find a touch that feels good. Maybe that's all we're doing in that day, but that's still valuable. You know, practicing and outdated and unproven frameworks from 30 to 40 years ago. This is not acceptable. I could go on and on on about these things forever, but that's what the rest of these, uh, podcast episodes are for. I'm can do my best to get new pa uh, episodes out every two weeks. I will try my best. I can't guarantee it, but, you know, life happens. But please, if you want to subscribe, please check out in the show notes below. I will. There's a link there where you can subscribe to, to new podcasts. Otherwise you can just go to Buzz Sprout. Um, and you can go to Purves, uh, search purves versus there, or please visit me on my website, which is eric purves.com. That's E R I C P U R v E S or connect with me on social media. Uh, Facebook and Instagram are the ones I'm at the most, so Eric Purvis, R m t. Is my Facebook. Um, name or Eric underscore Purvis underscore rmt on Instagram. Please connect with me there and if you have any questions, comments, or anything you'd like me to cover in future episodes or if you just have questions about anything in general related to the professional massage therapy, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can connect me, uh, on my website, which is once again, www.ericpurvis.com. Thank you for listening.