DocRobert

10/02/2026

Jubilación - Retirement

En marzo cumpliré 65 años y, por motivos personales y de salud, he decidido jubilarme anticipadamente.Tengo previsto dejar de ejercer el 30 de mayo de este año.

Sin embargo, esto no es el final. Más noticias más adelante.

La imagen es para llamar la atención. En la mitología china, el dragón representa la transformación y la buena fortuna, entre otras cosas.

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In March I will be 65 years old, and for both personal and health reasons I have made the decision to retire early. I plan to stop practising on 30th May this year.

However, this is not the end. More news later.

The picture is to grab attention. In Chinese mythology the dragon represents transformation and good fortune among other things.

10/02/2026

NOT

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a bias in thinking where people with low ability in a specific discipline (e.g. beginners and superficial improvisers) tend to overestimate their competence, because they are unable to perceive its complexity or to recognise their limitations.

In alternative medicine circles the D-K effect is endemic.

Their are many alternative 'alternative' theories to the one represented here, and their proponents are all very sure of themselves.

Medical scientists who spend years and decades studying these things through meticulous experimentation believe they know something about each of them, not completely and with lots of doubts. Science always admits doubt.

Socrates was a wise man by all accounts. Plato records him recounting how the Oracle of Delphi declared him the wisest Athenian. To test this, he questioned politicians, poets, and craftsmen, finding they claimed knowledge they lacked. He concluded that he was wiser because, "what I do not know, I do not think I know".

I would like to know how the person who wrote the words in the photo, found on an Ibiza FB page, came by their superhuman knowledge.

10/02/2026

A depressed person told me they found no meaning in life, except personal pleasure, and they could find no pleasure in the things that used to bring pleasure. This is the road to nihilism, and that is doom. One must find meaning or purpose. Family and friends. Personal betterment. Passions. Being useful to your community or society as a whole (vocation). Knowledge that there are things that are greater than oneself.

07/02/2026

Labours of a Modern Small Time Hercules

I have an electric treatment table which goes up and down. It is 30 years old. Two years ago the electric motor died and I ordered a new treatment table made to my specifications from a company called Sysamed in Jerez de la Frontera. I paid in advance and they never delivered the table. So one year ago I requested a "Juicio Verbal" (like the small claims court in the UK) from the court in Jerez de la Frontera. In July last year they issued their sentence, in my favour. Sysamed has to refund my money (800 odd euros) with interest. The haven't refunded my money. What happens next is that you have to apply to the court to have the court order enforced. This I did in October last year. I sent my application to the same court that had made the judgement. I know they received my application, as I have the signed proof of receipt. I heard nothing for three months, so I began trying to contact the clerk of the court to ask how the application was proceeding. I sent multiple emails - no reply. I called by phone many times - nobody ever answered. I sent a fax - no reply. Eventually in a fit of fury and frustration, I fired off five emails in quick succession, all with the same text decrying their evident contempt of the ordinary citizen who pays their salaries and their obvious cynicism towards their role as public servants (which by the way means they have to serve the public - the clue is in the name). This had the effect of raising someone in the office out of their state of indolence, very slightly. I thought there was a chance it might: it is a trick I have used to effect in the past. I got a one line reply informing me that my application to have the court order enforced should be sent to the "Common Registration and Distribution Service". Whaaat?!!! I sent another email, asking them: 1. Why they had not told me this three months ago, when they received my application. 2. What had they done with my application. 3. Why they do not answer the phone. 4. For the address of the "Common Registration and Distribution Service". I got a one line reply indicating the phone number of the said office. So I phoned the Common Registration and Distribution Service. They answered the phone at the first attempt, and were helpful. They checked their files but could find no record of any application from me for enforcement of the court order. I would have to send it again, but this time to their office. In the meantime I had already looked up their address. It is at the SAME FU***NG ADDRESS as the court I had sent my application to. Surely they could have sent Juan or José or Maria along the corridor or up to the first floor to deliver my application to the right office? No, they couldn't be fu***ng bothered. I mentioned this to the man at the other end of the phone line. He suggested I phone the court to ask them what they had done with my application. I told him they don't answer the phone. He was sympathetic but fatalistic: "Ah", he said, "Yes, a lot of the courts don't answer the phone". In the meantime I had also sent a complaint to the "Consejo General de Poder Judicial" in Madrid (they have a complaints procedure) detailing my difficulty in contacting the court in Jerez de la Frontera and decrying their contempt of the ordinary citizen who pays their salaries and their obvious cynicism towards their role as public servants. A reply came, and its content was hopelessly irrelevant to my complaint. It was clear from what was written in it that the person who wrote it had not read my complaint with any care. Anyway, they sent me a link to the contacts page of the Justice Department of the Junta de Andalucía. I have used their contact form before. They don't reply.

Hassles like this are just minor inconveniences in this fu**ed up world where many people are suffering terribly. Nevertheless, in our smug, bloated and decadent society, mindless, stupid and uncaring bureaucracy is a bugbear sufficient to significantly affect people's quality of life. In our modern so called "civilisation", the machine is too large and complicated and unwieldy and over-regulated. Do this, don't do that, fill in this long form, and this one, no that's the wrong one, do it again, pay this tax and that one, meet these requirements and those, oh dear you missed something, pay this fine, and that one, prove this, prove that, justify your existence till your dead. And don't complain because it's all your fault if you didn't follow the correct labyrinthine procedures and we don't care anyway.

"They steal away your hours, and you won't get them back
You'll watch them scatter from the rear, along the railroad track
They steal away your hours, and you won't get them back
Watch them blow towards the night, along the darkening track"

05/02/2026

Odd this... Two of the biggest (perhaps the biggest) British political scandals of the last 70 years, and osteopathy is in some way involved in both of them!

The Profumo affair (1963) was a major scandal in which John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, lied to Parliament about his s*xual relationship with the call girl Christine Keeler, who also had ties to a Soviet naval attaché. When the lie was exposed, Profumo resigned, badly damaging the Conservative government and contributing to its election defeat the following year. Stephen Ward was an osteopath who moved in elite social and political circles in late-1950s and early-1960s London. He acted as the social link between John Profumo, Christine Keeler, and others, introducing them at his parties; after the scandal broke, Ward was prosecuted for “living off immoral earnings,” becoming the scapegoat of the affair, and died by su***de in 1963 just before the jury returned a guilty verdict.

Fast forward to 2026, controversy centers on newly released U.S. Department of Justice documents suggesting that former British cabinet minister and recently Ambassador to the U.S., peer of the realm Peter Mandelson maintained a close relationship with convicted s*x offender Jeffrey Epstein, including alleged financial links and the sharing of sensitive government information while in office. As a result, Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords and the Labour Party and is now the subject of a criminal police investigation for alleged misconduct in public office tied to those Epstein files. As Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party appointed Mandleson as Ambassador knowing (allegedely) that he had maintained these links, the affair may spell the end for Starmer's premiership and possibly also bring about the fall of the government. According to the newly released documents, Epstein sent about £10,000 to Reinaldo Avila da Silva, Lord Peter Mandelson’s husband, in 2009 after da Silva asked for help paying fees related to an osteopathy course. (According to an official statement from the General osteopathic Council in early February 2026, da Silva did not graduate from a recognised osteopathy course and has never been registered with the GOsC.)

[Photo: "Society osteopath" Stephen Ward with Christine Keeler (right) and friends.]

02/02/2026

Read about different kinds of herbalism:

The use of plants as medicine is most probably, along with massage, one of the first kinds of medicine on the planet. The knowledge of medicinal plants and their uses would have been built up over …

31/01/2026

¡SIN POLÍTICA, POR FAVOR! [For ENGLISH, scroll down]

Prefiero no hablar mientras atiendo a un paciente. Hablar de sus problemas debería hacerse antes o después, no durante. Pero a algunos les gusta hablar, otros no pueden callarse; ¡es increíble lo aterrador que les resulta el silencio a algunos! Pero bien, está bien. Cualquier tema es bueno, cualquiera excepto... ¡política! No toco política en la consulta. Hace tiempo, en la prehistoria, siendo muy joven, solicité un trabajo como profesor de inglés en una gran cadena de escuelas de idiomas en Grecia. Tuve una entrevista en Londres con el dueño de la empresa y me dijo: «Tenemos una regla: nunca se debe hablar de política en clase». Había algo más que no se debía mencionar, pero no recuerdo qué. Los griegos pueden ser gente fogosa y su política era frágil en aquel entonces; creo que hacía solo diez años que habían salido de la ley marcial. En cualquier caso, tenía razón, y ahora intento aplicar esta regla en la clínica. En el pasado, en la misma mañana, un comunista y un fascista me contaron espontáneamente sus opiniones políticas. No le veo sentido, ¿qué me importa? Te respeto como persona y siento compasión por tu sufrimiento, pero tu política no es mi preocupación. Siento que se espera que esté de acuerdo con ellos y que ambos podamos sentirnos bien juntos. ¿O si no, qué? Algunas personas se ofenden si no estás de acuerdo con ellas o cuestionas su punto de vista, y eso podría dañar la relación terapéutica. Además, ¡hablar de política no es la razón por la que estamos allí juntos! Así que debo mantenerme callado, ser anodino, neutral, sin comprometerme. Lo mismo se aplica a cualquier opinión fuerte que alguien exprese y que sea irrelevante para el tratamiento o la salud de la persona.

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[ENGLISH]

NO POLITICS, PLEASE!

My preference is not to talk while I treat a patient. Talking about a patient's issues should really happen before or afterwards, not during. But some people like to talk, some people cannot not talk - it is amazing how frightening silence is to some people! But I am cool with that, it's OK. Any subject is good, any except... politics! I don't do politics in the practice. Once upon a time in pre-history when I was a very young man, I applied for a job to teach English with a large chain of language schools in Greece. I had an interview in London with the owner of the company and he said, "One rule that we have is that you're never to talk about politics in class." There was something else not to talk about as well, but I can't remember what it was. Greeks can be fiery people and their politics was fragile at the time, I think they were just 10 years out of martial law. He was right in any case and nowadays I try to apply this rule in the clinic. In the past I have had, in the same morning, a communist and a fascist spontaneously telling me about their political views. I see no point in it, I mean, what do I care? I respect you as a person and feel compassion for your suffering, but your politics is not my concern. I feel the expectation is that I should agree with them and we can both feel righteous together. Or else what? Some people get offended if you do not agree with them, or question their point of view, and that would risk damaging the therapeutic relationship. Besides, discussing politics is not the reason for us being there together! So I must remain quiet, bland, neutral, non-committal. Same goes for any strong views that someone expresses that are irrelevant to the treatment or the person's health.

28/01/2026

The material presented here is the result of a collaboration between myself and the Dusun, Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. It was first gathered in April 2013 and updated on a subsequent visit…

26/01/2026

Si me dieran cien euros por cada vez que he oído a alguien decir esto, ¡estaría camino de ser millonario! Suele suceder que no conocen su cuerpo tan bien como les gustaría creer. ¡De verdad, es cierto!

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If I had a hundred quid for every time I've heard someone say this, I'd be well on the way to being a millionaire!

It usually turns out they don't know their body nearly as well as they'd like to believe. Honestly, it's true!

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Picture from https://www.amazon.es/Know-My-Body-Childrens-Physiology-ebook/dp/B01A2YJ2ZW

16/01/2026

[ESPAÑOL más abajo] An expert is not somebody who knows everything about his field.

Osteopathy is both an intellectual and a practical discipline. I have been practising it for 32 years. Do I know everything? Of course not!

In this kind of discipline expertise is having enough depth and breadth of knowledge to understand the fundamentals well, to know how to apply them with reasonably predictable results, to know what to do if the results aren't as predicted, to know where to look for information that one does not know and what information to look for, and to distinguish with fair accuracy between information that is probably reliable and information that is dubious or probably wrong.

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[ESPAÑOL]

Un experto no es alguien que lo sabe todo sobre su campo.

La osteopatía es una disciplina tanto intelectual como práctica. Llevo 32 años practicándola. ¿Lo sé todo? ¡Claro que no!

En este tipo de disciplina, ser experto consiste en tener conocimientos lo suficientemente profundos y amplios como para comprender bien los fundamentos, saber cómo aplicarlos con resultados razonablemente predecibles, saber qué hacer si los resultados no son los previstos, saber dónde buscar información desconocida y qué información buscar, y distinguir con bastante precisión entre información probablemente fiable e información dudosa o probablemente errónea.

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[Image from https://wasteawaygroup.com/blog/integra-expert/]

15/01/2026

In both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western herbal medicine, viral illness is understood not as a single entity, but as a dynamic interaction between an external pathogen and the internal terr…

19/12/2025

[For ENGLISH scroll down]

Una habilidad peculiar de los osteópatas es la mayor sensibilidad del tacto que adquirimos con los años. Podemos percibir pequeños matices en la textura y las características físicas de los tejidos corporales, así como pequeñas variaciones en la alineación, el rango o el movimiento de la columna vertebral y las articulaciones. Combinada con nuestro conocimiento de la anatomía, esta sensibilidad nos permite visualizar mentalmente lo que sucede en el cuerpo mientras trabajamos. Un famoso osteópata hablaba de "dedos que ven, piensan, sienten, saben". Algo que muchos osteópatas pueden sentir y con lo que trabajan, algunos más que otros, es lo que llamamos "Impulso Rítmico Craneal" (IRC) o "ritmo craneal". Se puede percibir como una expansión y disminución regular y rítmica del volumen de la cabeza, similar al movimiento del pecho al respirar que cualquiera puede sentir u observar, pero mucho más sutil. Algunos osteópatas comienzan a sentir esto desde el principio de su formación, incluso de inmediato; para otros, lleva un tiempo considerable. Los científicos y médicos suelen ser escépticos sobre su existencia, a pesar de que existen estudios que han detectado objetivamente un movimiento rítmico del cráneo. Pero la cuestión es simplemente que los osteópatas tienen dedos y manos muy sensibles. Para los osteópatas con experiencia en el tratamiento craneal, el ritmo craneal es tan evidente como la brisa en la piel del rostro.

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[ENGLISH]

One skill peculiar to osteopaths is the heightened sensitivity of our sense of touch that we acquire over the years. We are able to feel small nuances in the texture and physical characteristics of the body's tissues, as well as small variations in the alignment, range or movement of the spine and joints. Combined with our knowledge of anatomy, this sensitivity allows us to see moving pictures in our minds of what is happening in the body while we are working. One famous osteopath spoke of "seeing, thinking, feeling, knowing fingers". Something that many osteopaths can feel and work with, some more than others, is what we call the "Cranial Rhythmic Impulse" (CRI) or "cranial rhythm" for short. It can be felt as a regular, rhythmic expansion and diminution in volume of the head, much like movement of the chest in breathing that anybody can feel or observe, but much more subtle. Some osteopaths begin to feel this early on in their training, even immediately; for others it takes a considerable time. Scientists and doctors are often sceptical about its existence, even though there are studies that have objectively detected a rhythmic movement of the skull. But the thing is simply that osteopaths have highly sensitive fingers and hands. To osteopaths experienced with working on the cranium, the cranial rhythm is just as plain as a breeze on the skin of your face is to you.