Professional Development and Evidence-Based Practice

Can the flexibility of a new professional development model for massage therapists change the status quo? Discover how British Columbia’s innovative approach is setting the stage for a shift in how therapists across Canada approach continuing education. We delve into the challenges and triumphs of this flexible professional development model, weighing the benefits of personalized learning against the risks of diminished oversight. Hear firsthand about our experiences and the fervent support we’ve encountered, as well as the critical role that evidence-based practices must play in shaping the future of massage therapy education.

This episode takes us to the American Massage Therapy Association's annual conference in Tampa, Florida, where we shared insights on managing fibromyalgia. This international perspective highlights the gaps and opportunities in Canadian massage therapy professional associations. We reflect on the current climate for Registered Massage Therapists, emphasizing the need for critical thinking and a shift away from outdated traditions to evidence-backed knowledge.

Our conversation culminates in a call to action for therapists to challenge the status quo and embrace a more inclusive approach to learning. By focusing on the integration of manual skills within an evidence-based framework, we champion the need to reduce pseudoscience and foster critical thinking throughout the profession. Listen in to gain a deeper understanding of how massage therapists can redefine their practice to truly benefit their clients, keeping pace with the latest scientific standards and innovations in the field.

Chapters

• 0:08 Massage Therapy Professional Development and Unity
• 12:20 Flexible Professional Development Program Concerns
• 21:02 Challenges in Evidence-Based Practice
• 31:02 Defining Evidence-Based Massage Therapy

Transcript

Eric: 0:08

Hello and welcome to another episode of Purvs Versus. My name is Eric Purvis. I'm a massage therapist course creator, continuing education provider, curriculum advisor and advocate for evidence-based massage therapy. This is going to be the last episode in the Purvis vs name. I have taken some time off. As you probably noticed, I have not released a new episode in a few months now.

Eric: 0:36

As I was trying to decide what is the direction that I want to take in this podcast. That I want to take in this podcast and the more I thought about it and the more comments and questions I received from listeners and from people that have attended my courses recently. They wanted more discussion about science, they wanted more discussion about the evidence and initially I was kind of thinking there's a lot of other podcasts out there that discuss this. But after having done some reflection and some deep thought about what it is that I want to do with this, I figured, yes, why not, let's talk about that stuff, because there wasn't actually anybody out there that I felt that was talking about these things from a massage therapist perspective. So this episode here I discuss the new professional development program in BC because that's where I live and that's where most of the listeners come from, but I think that this new program will be something that's going to be adopted by more provinces across Canada and potentially other parts of the world as well. So, even if you don't live in BC, I will be talking a lot about the journeys and expectations that you should have as a massage therapist for pursuing your continuing education, your quality assurance, your professional development. Let me know what you think. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Eric: 2:04

Well, it feels good to be back and to be recording some more episodes. As I mentioned in the intro, it's been a bit of a break for me, so it feels good. I got a bunch of new ideas. I'm feeling refreshed and feeling like I'm slowly recovering from the busy fall. For those of you in BC and I believe, in Ontario as well, the professional development program that is a requirement finishes at the end of October. I'm recording this episode early November and I'm just taking some more time to just decompress a little bit the process of doing the PDP. I didn't find too difficult, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in this episode, about my thoughts and the direction it's taking us, which is predominantly positive, but I also wanted to just say that being a continuing education provider is always a very busy time of year, so for me, traditionally, september, october are almost always my busiest months.

Eric: 2:59

I wanted to start off this episode here by just saying thank you and to express my gratitude to all of the listeners, all the people that follow me on social media or email, all the people that support me and encourage me and allow me to do what I do for a living, which is to teach and create continuing education. It is probably I should say probably. It is definitely the most rewarding job I've ever had. Feels so good to try to make the world a better place with more evidence-based information out there. It feels good to help people to make better clinical decisions, to think differently about what it is that maybe they hadn't been taught before or what they were doing. And also it's empowering, because when you can help people to be better clinicians and then you get the feedback from those therapists that say that they've applied some of the things they've learned from my courses into their clinical practice, and feedback that they're getting from their patients, their clients, is significant. That feels really good because it makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. I'm not just speaking and teaching and it's not having an influence. So I just want to say thank you for everybody.

Eric: 4:19

This last fall, this last year actually 2024 was my best year in terms of all metrics with my continuing education, and that's really encouraging. That means that people are really supporting it and grabbing on to the things I am trying to do. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I couldn't do this without you. What I did do this fall something that was interesting and new for me, which I thought I would share with you was I was invited to speak at the AMTA, the American Massage Therapy Association's annual conference in Tampa, Florida, in September, and that was an experience in a very good way. It was a very, very positive experience. I was honored to be able to go down there and teach for two days, and I or sorry, teach twice in one day.

Eric: 5:10

It was a lecture, just a lecture on fibromyalgia management, so it was basically a topic that was very much in line with what I like to talk about, which is chronic pain, but specifically to processes involved with fibromyalgia risk factors, treatment options, what can we do as a massage therapist and it was great to be in a completely different location with a completely different audience from anything I'd ever experienced before, and the amount of support that Americans have for their AMTA was quite overwhelming in a very positive way, because the amount of people that went to this conference was astronomical. I can't even explain how many people were there compared to what we do in Canada. I think there's probably 1,500, 1,800 people is maybe the number I heard floating around, but it was in a massive conference center. There was multiple courses and presenters going at the same time all week long. Each of these courses were absolutely packed, jammed, packed, filled with people. I believe for the two fibromyalgia lectures that I did, we had well over a hundred for each. I've never seen anything like that in BC before, other than at like a big conference, where there's just one thing, one person, presenting at a time. So it was really great to see the support that the presenters have down there and there was tons of different topics, but the amount of interesting and intelligent questions and discussions I had was really, really, really encouraging.

Eric: 6:56

I know oftentimes in our industry there's a lot of division or almost stereotyping of different countries or different provinces or different states about who's better, who's got more education, who's got less education, who's more into pseudoscience, blah, blah blah. And I think that is really quite a divisive attitude, because I've been very fortunate enough to teach all over North America. I've been in every province in Canada except for Quebec. I have taught numerous times in the US. I've done stuff overseas and what I found is that a massage therapist is a massage therapist. If you are putting your hands on people predominantly. That's your main intervention, which is for all of us. Then we're trying to make people feel better through touch. It doesn't seem to matter where you are. Everyone has the best of intentions and everyone is striving to learn, to be better and try to learn to have more knowledge and to be a better clinician. And it doesn't matter where you're from. And it doesn't matter where you're from. I have not seen a drastic difference in knowledge really, whether you came from a 500-hour regulation or a 3,000-hour regulation. It seems to be very, very consistent and that's been really encouraging. This was really encouraging to me. I wasn't a big surprise because I had experienced that before when I've been to the US, but just to see so many wonderful therapists there from numerous states, it was great.

Eric: 8:40

A national organization that would really be able to bring everybody together once a year. I think that would be fantastic for our profession up here in Canada. I know we've got the CMTA and there's all these other acronymed associations out there that say they're a national organization, but there's lots of parts of the country that are missed out with those because sometimes they only involve regulated provinces or sometimes they exclude certain ones because they don't meet a specific criteria. Honestly, in my opinion, for our profession to move forward, we definitely need to have a national, unified association that we can all be part of, rather than having these segmented associations spread out throughout Canada. And I don't think it's helpful either to have multiple associations in one province. I understand why they have them. I understand why there, why there is a need for them right now but I'm probably going a bit off topic here but it the desire for massage therapists in this country to be recognized as a legitimate health care profession, to be appreciated for the, the education and the work that we do and the difference that we can make people's lives. I don't see how that's going to be very possible If we have so many different associations all advocating for only their own self interests. We need a unified group and I hope that in my lifetime in my career in this profession that we will see something and maybe there is some steps moving towards that right now. See something, and maybe there is some steps moving towards that right now, but we definitely have a lot further to go, particularly when compared to our neighbors to the south, where it seems that they have a lot of support and a lot going on with a massive organization like the mta. So thank you to the mta and thank you to all the American MTs that came. It was great to connect with you and I know a bunch of you were going to listen to the podcast. So I just want to say thank you for taking the time to say hi and take obviously, thank you for taking the time to come listen to me speak about fibromyalgia.

Eric: 10:59

Now, the one thing I really wanted to focus on with this episode being the last kind of my, of my purpose versus episode now, the, the new one, the new uh podcast I'm gonna be doing moving forward. It's gonna be very it's gonna be similar in some ways, but it's gonna be different some ways. In in regards that I'm not gonna be doing as many interviews. This will be more uh discussions, a little bit more monologues of me talking about specific topics, particularly focusing on the science. So the new podcast moving forward is going to be called Massage Science, and what I want to do is I want to talk about the science of touch musculoskeletal care and try and keep that as relevant as possible to massage therapy, and I'll talk about, you know, regulatory things. I'll still talk about topics with certain individuals that want to be on or that invite to be on the on the podcast, but I want to. I want to focus more on the science aspect of things. Like I said before, massage science is what it's going to be called. It'll still be on the same url and it'll still be on the same website or the same networks, so it shouldn't be any more difficult to find, because I'm going to try and keep it as simple as possible. Just change the name and the logo a little bit. Now the thing that we want to talk about, though, today is let's talk about the new professional development program that is just finished here in BC.

Eric: 12:20

Now, with this new PDP program, it was a complete change from how things have been done forever. The previous program followed the standard you needed a certain number of hours of credits and you had two years to satisfy them. That usually translated to you needed basically a weekend workshop, one per year, and then you would submit your certificate and you'd be signed off and then you'd have to pursue the thing again the next year. Now this was great for continuing education providers because it created this consistent attendance and consistent interest in your course, because you basically would teach a course every year and you could have a couple of different ones and you would just kind of get this, you know. You know that you could plan a certain number of weekends to teach and it was fine. But as a learner, as a therapist, it wasn't the greatest system because you would have to choose pre-approved courses and sometimes the courses you might want to take were not convenient for your schedule. Or maybe you're interested in a topic and there just wasn't a course out there that you could find that was approved on that topic, on that topic. So it almost forced us to attend a weekend just to get credits, even though it may not have always been in our own best interest or in best practice. And I think it allowed a lot of the modality empire courses to proliferate, because what ended up happening was you were required to take courses that had to be hands-on courses that involve critical thinking or involved even things like biopsychosocial you know, which was a big topic, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, was there's courses coming out about that stuff that maybe were more about discussion and active listening, and these type of things were not approved. So you were basically forced to take a hands-on course and that, like I said before, that allowed this modality empire proliferation.

Eric: 14:25

And not saying there's anything wrong with learning techniques and some people get me wrong and I think when they listen to to me, thinking that oh, we shouldn't, we shouldn't learn techniques, that's useless. That's not what I'm saying, but I'm saying that we should. We have to obviously have good, skilled hands. However, we should be allowed and be encouraged in our profession to pursue knowledge acquisition and learning more about certain pathologies or patient demographics or, you know, research or other things other than just the hands-on stuff. And I'm glad that they got rid of the old system even though for me as a continuing education provider, it was very good.

Eric: 15:08

But with the new system there's no more hours requirement, you can. All you need to do is choose two learning outcomes or two learning goals and then you get to the flexibility to choose how you want to do those. You know working adult professional who maybe doesn't want to or can't afford to take a weekend off to travel out of town If you don't live in a major urban area, it's very difficult to you know, you have to travel and you'd have to stay in hotels and you have to go out and eat dinner a few times. There's a lot of extra costs and inconvenience. So this new program does a great job of saying, hey, you've got some flexibility. Do you want to attend a conference? Do you want to do some stuff online? Do you want to take an in-person course, you know, do you want to do some study groups or do you want to do some research reviews? There's a lot of other opportunities now for us to learn and this is going to be the way forward, I'm sure, in most massage therapy associations and regulatory colleges across the country. I know Ontario has a very similar program called STRIVE which is quite a few years ahead of BC's. I do know that in Saskatchewan they are with MTAS, they are moving towards a similar thing and I do know a few of these smaller associations across Canada already have this self-directed process.

Eric: 16:48

Now the thing is there's the good and then there's the bad. So the counter to this is now there is no longer any real oversight of what it is you're learning. You can basically say and try to defend whatever it is you want to learn and use that to satisfy your learning goal. Now there's criteria, there's certain things that we are supposed to be mindful of and we're supposed to use to help us make these decisions about what we learn. But, based on a lot of the conversations and things that I see on social media and the conversations I've had with colleagues, the evidence-based approach to how we're supposed to practice. The evidence-based approach also applies to how we're supposed to pursue and satisfy our professional development program or a new quality assurance program isn't really being followed now.

Eric: 17:46

I understand that this is a brand new thing that just took effect this year, so I'm hoping to see more guidance and support moving forward, or maybe even having RMTs audited and in a safe way. That's not too scary. It doesn't mean you're gonna lose your license, but to have somebody from the college say, hey, let's look at your what you've done and then give provide some guidance on how they could have done better. How could you make your learning plan more evidence, better. How could you make your learning plan more evidence-based? How could you satisfy these learning requirements? By being more evidence-based, because with all these guidelines that we're supposed to follow, with all these PDFs and websites that we're supposed to read all the information from, it's great, but if you don't actually spend the time to do that and there's no support for you after the fact, then how are we supposed to learn and how are we supposed to grow and how are we supposed to be better clinicians? I think it's very difficult.

Eric: 18:43

So there definitely needs to be another step to this, and the reason I say there should be another step to this is because I see a lot of uses and abuses of the term evidence-based practice. The general consensus from a lot of the discussions I have and a lot of things that people bring to me is that they think evidence-based practice is just research evidence, it's this very recipe, prescriptive thing, and that's not true. Actually, evidence based practice is quite flexible If you use it for the within the spirit of what it is intended. Now, I've had a bunch of other episodes that have explored evidence based practice and what that means and what that looks like, so we're not going to talk about that today in specifics, but the use and abuse of evidence basedbased practice, particularly in the continuing education world, I feel is something that definitely needs to be worked on, because, according to our college standards, you know that we have these practice standards and this should be the way it is. You know, every association or college across the country is going to have some level of practice standards, which is basically the minimum expectation for you as a massage therapist in terms of how you conduct yourself in practice, and the definition on our college website is that the practice standards define the minimum level of expected performance for registered massage therapists and therefore define what constitutes safe, ethical and competent delivery of care by RMTs. The idea is that when we leave school, it's entry to practice. We pass that board exam, it's the minimum standard, and we're supposed to grow from there. One of the problems that we see, though, is that, because the entry to practice standards miss out on providing RMTs the knowledge, the skills, the appreciation for evidence and evidence-based practice and what that means, it's very difficult for a lot of us to then have an evidence-based quality assurance program or have an evidence-based professional growth pathway when the basic principles of it are missed in our entry-level practice.

Eric: 21:02

Now, for those of you that are aware or that know, the inter-jurisdictional competency documents which the schools are supposed to use to teach base their teachings from. It's what the regulatory colleges use to base their licensing exams on these. There is a mention of evidence-based practice in there, but that doesn't mean that everyone's taught it and it doesn't mean that everyone's taught it and it doesn't mean that it's incorporated in every single school curriculum. And I've looked at a lot of the school curriculums and I can 100 guarantee you that most of them are not evidence-based. Now there is a way to include current evidence to make it fit within the inter-jurisdictional documents and competencies that practice competencies and practice indicators but that is not done by the majority of schools. So it's up to us in the continuing education world to try to fill this gap, and that's one of the things that I try to do.

Eric: 22:10

Now, the thing that is important is, if you don't have an understanding of evidence-based practice, is to learn the basics of what it means, and a lot of that comes down to critical thinking and to critical thought and to asking a lot of questions and to questioning what do you know and how do you know what you know. Is what you know valid? Is it based on hearsay? Is it based on good quality evidence? Is it based on what someone told you? It's really important for us to start off by asking ourselves the questions how do I know what I know? Because an evidence-based practice is going to require you to critically assess all the information, and this is outlined again in our practice standards, focusing on facts and observations rather than beliefs, opinions and traditions. Hugely, hugely important to understand that the large majority of the stuff that we learn, not only in school but also in continuing education, also in our professional development, quality assurance, whatever terms you want to use are based usually on opinions and traditions rather than on current science. And there's also a use and abuse of current science or current anatomical knowledge to try to use that information to try to influence a tradition or belief. So we need to challenge what we think we know in order to get better. That's one of the most basic, fundamental aspects that we need to appreciate in evidence-based practice.

Eric: 23:42

So let's move on and talk about the Quality Assurance Program in BC. Now the guiding principles, and this is, according to the Complementary Health Professionals of BC, which is our new regulatory college. Here. The guiding principles of the redesign of the QA program for RMTs are it's got to be based on core competencies, professional standards and standards of practice for safe, ethical and competent practice. It supports high practice standards, supports RMTs and continued practice improvement, is inclusive and fairly applied to all RMTs, ensures all RMTs are able to achieve their requirements in a meaningful way, is based on best available evidence and is consistent with the CCHPBC's mandate to protect the public. These are great guiding principles, but let's look at how these things can be applied, or how they should be, in my opinion. Applied to practice. So based on core competencies, which makes sense, right, we got to keep within our scope of practice and the professional standards.

Eric: 24:44

The other point, though, in this first line here says standards of practice for safe, ethical and competent practice. So our standards of practice. One of our standards of practice is an evidence-based practice standard, which means we have to pursue learning that's based on current best evidence. So it is a logical train of thought for me to say if we have an evidence-based practice standard and our new quality assurance program is based on these standards of practices, therefore, our continuing education needs to be based on evidence. That means that learning things that have no basis in evidence or are based on conjecture shouldn't actually be allowed. That means a lot of the modality empire approaches. If they are still perpetuating 1980s, 1990s belief systems, information, or based on belief systems information, or based on incomplete hypotheses or ideals, that actually shouldn't count for your quality assurance.

Eric: 25:56

And the difficult thing, though, is how is an RMT supposed to know whether something doesn't meet that evidence-based practice standard when we're not taught it in the first place? If you are somebody that does say craniosacral therapy, which is something that's been done for a long time and it's got a lot of beliefs around it and there's a lot of pseudoscience around it and that's not disputed the clinical application of it, sure it can help people, sure people might feel better, but the science around it is, in a lot of cases, just completely non-existent. But if you were taught that in school and previously, if you had taken courses and certifications in that, and you were taught by these people, these con ed instructors that really believed in it, and maybe they presented some evidence to you that sounded compelling, then of course it's easy for us to fall into these traps of thinking that what we're doing is evidence-based when it's not. So there's a lot of use and abuse of evidence. There's a lot of use and abuse of people passing off really crappy science and saying it's good science and without us having that support and understanding at an entry to practice level as well as through our associations, regulatory bodies, it's easy for us to miss that. So I would say that a lot of us, when we were a lot of people, when they were doing their professional or their PDP program here, they were not following an evidence-based development program. It's not for any fault of their own. I think it's a fault of the entire system. The stakeholders involved need to step up the game on this, and I sound like a broken record because I've been saying that a million times Now.

Eric: 27:46

The other thing that I did like about this program though it's not all bad is it's inclusive. So it means it doesn't matter where you live, who you are. You have options for you, different learning styles. You can choose the best way to learn for you. This other point says ensures that all RMTs are able to achieve the requirements in a meaningful way. That's great because, again, that's inclusive. It allows you to pursue these things and it doesn't have to be that difficult. It doesn't have to be expensive either.

Eric: 28:19

Is it consistent, though, with the mandate to protect the public? I know that the regulatory colleges have this mandate that's given to them by government says your job is to protect the public, but I think there's a very strong argument that we can make which says that if you are practicing and you're in a way that's non-evidence based, you're not really protecting the public. Are you doing them a lot of harm? Most know, but are you providing competent, safe or ethical care? Maybe it's safe, but it's not ethical or competent if we're practicing in a non evidence based way. So there's there's definitely a need for improvement.

Eric: 28:58

Now, I know from some of the feedback I get from people is they feel that I'm overly critical, and I'm, you know, can maybe be not supportive enough of certain things, but I strongly believe that, in order for our profession to get better, we need to ask hard questions and we need to not accept just the status quo as being okay. I strongly believe that we need to challenge these beliefs and we need to challenge a system which is there, which should look to support us, to move forward and to be better clinicians, but there's still some big holes there. Now the PDP program is better than the old one. Yes, I agree with that. For someone like myself who teaches predominantly online whether it's live online or self-directed courses it's great because I feel that I can create content that gives people lots of options to learn based on what they want, and try and have some affordable options. Some ones are a little more expensive but provide things for them so they can learn whether you're in BC or anywhere across Canada or the world. But until we really have a better grasp in our profession of what evidence-based practice is and how this applies to what we do in clinic every day and how this applies to the learning that we pursue, I think we're still going to be left behind.

Eric: 30:17

And when I say things like the use and abuse of evidence-based practice, what's that mean? I'll give you an example here, and this is one that I've seen a few times and more than a few. I've seen this a lot Because evidence-based practice is a buzzword. A lot of people are using it, just like patient-centered care is a buzzword. Pain science is a buzzword. Biopsychosocial is a buzzword. These are all things that people use and I feel that oftentimes they get used because everyone's saying them and a lot of people will use them without really understanding kind of the philosophical applications of what these actually mean. Anybody can say evidence-based practice, but just because you say it doesn't mean it's true.

Eric: 31:02

And if you just look at, say, a course description or a website and someone says I will meet your therapeutic needs with an evidence-based approach that's rooted in deep tissue massage therapy, what does that mean? What is deep tissue massage therapy? Is that evidence-based? What is deep tissue massage therapy? Is that evidence-based? We all know what deep tissue is in terms of. It's a term that we use, but it's actually not a defined term. It's a feeling and everyone's kind of understanding of deep tissue is going to be different.

Eric: 31:45

Does that mean you're putting in more pressure? Does that mean that you are treating deeper structures? How do you know that? Is that possible? Is it necessary? Can you treat deeper tissues? Where's the evidence on that? You can't say that you treat deep tissue without evidence to support. So yeah, I'm treating these other structures here and I I am because of blah, blah, blah, these papers. And again we could say do you need to treat deep? Whatever that might be right is deep your perception. Is it the perception of the person on the table? Are you getting a ruler or measuring tape and measuring depth? Every human, every body is different. Sometimes light pressure could feel like it's really deep on somebody and vice versa, you could be putting a lot of pressure on someone where you feel like you're squishing and mashing everything and they don't feel like it's deep. So it's those kind of terms that we use. We should question those Is that evidence-based?

Eric: 32:46

If you're going to claim that you're evidence-based, well, I'm an evidence-based practitioner and these are all the techniques and my favorite modalities blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That to me is a red flag, saying that, well, those are your preferred style, that's your preferred way of treating. But you can't say that's evidence-based, because everybody has their own unique style. Everybody has their own preferred way of treating people, whether they like a slower or a pokier or a flatter pressure or a. You know? Do you incorporate movement? Are you using different body parts? How are you treating somebody? We all have our own approaches and neither is right and neither is wrong.

Eric: 33:34

So I don't think that we can say you are evidence-based and then listing all your, listing all your techniques, because in order for you to say that those techniques are evidence-based, you'd have to have research to support them. So I think you can say I'm an evidence-based therapist who likes to treat certain populations of people athletes, pediatrics, chronic pain, whatever that might be. Or I'm an evidence-based practitioner that has a special interest in orthopedics, evidence-based practitioner that, like that, has a special interest in orthopedics female health. But you can't list all your techniques afterwards and say that you're evidence-based, because those two things don't don't match. They don't go well together, particularly when the evidence on all these techniques is all over the place. There is no one technique better than the other, because it is not the technique that is evidence-based, it is the knowledge and how you practice that should be based on evidence. I think the less wrong approach, the more evidence-based approach would be yeah, like I said, to list the populations that you're interested in and then say these are some of the techniques I feel, or these are some of the techniques that I like to use, and then you can list them. But don't try to sell those techniques as being evidence-based or better than anyone else's. I don't think it's a competition. Anyway, I could go on forever about that, but I think I'll just leave that there so I don't beat it to death.

Eric: 35:06

My hope is, as massage therapists in our profession and the stakeholders start to adopt more of these evidence-based approaches, that what we'll start to see is less pseudoscience. We'll start to see less modality empires trying to sell their fix, start to see less modality empires trying to sell their fix and we'll start to see more critical thinking and critical, critical analysis of what is that we think that we know, because anybody can give, can learn to give, an amazing, delicious sensory experience of a massage. But being able to use your manual skills and combine those into an evidence-based framework that supports somebody and utilizes everything within our scope of practice to help them the best that we can through our language, through our communication, through our hands, through the advice we give or through the advice that they request, requires a deeper understanding of the evidence and an appreciation for how that guides us. So if you've made it this far in the episode, I'm going to repeat myself again. What I would love for you to do is to ask yourself the hard questions how do I know what I know and is what I know valid? And you may not be able to come up with a good answer, but I highly suggest that you ask those hard questions so that way you can challenge yourself, to unlearn maybe some things or to relearn how it is what you are doing is helping people, because I can promise you this that a lot of the stuff that we learned in schools and that we learned in non-evidence-based professional development programs are not consistent with a current evidence-based practice standard, which is a requirement for our profession.

Eric: 37:17

Thanks for listening. I appreciate all of you for taking the time to be here. If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a five-star rating and share it on your favorite social media platform. You can always follow me on Instagram or Facebook at Eric Purvis RMT, and please head over to my website, ericpurviscom, to see a full listing of all my live courses, webinars and self-directed course options. Until next time, take care.