The Thinking Practitioner Podcast:

Episode 162: AI in Massage: Thinking Partner, Threat, or Crutch? 

Whitney Lowe  

Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner podcast, a podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today. I’m Whitney Lowe and I’m Til Luchau.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner. Thanks for joining us here where Books of Discovery has been a part of the massage therapy and bodywork world for over 25 years. Nearly 3000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks, e textbooks and digital resources. Books of Discovery likes to say that “Learning Adventures start here”, and they find that same spirit here on the Thinking Practitioner podcast, and are proud to support our work, knowing that we share the mission of bringing the massage and bodywork community thought provoking and enlivening content that advances our profession.

 

Til Luchau  

Instructors of manual therapy education programs can request complimentary copies of Books of Discovery’s, textbooks to review for using your programs. Listeners can explore their collection of learning resources for anatomy, pathology, kinesiology, physiology, ethics and business mastery at booksofdiscovery.com where you, as a Thinking Practitioner, listener, can save 15% by entering thinking at checkout.

 

Til Luchau  

Hello, Whitney, 

 

Whitney Lowe  

hello Til How are you today?

 

Til Luchau  

I am very well. Thanks. We’re recording this just after the start of the new year, and I’m freshly back for some great retreat and reflection time. Yeah, how was your new year?

 

Whitney Lowe  

It was good, nice and kind of relaxing over the holidays, and ready to jump into a new year for this year. So, yeah, ready to get going on some new and interesting stuff.

Til Luchau  

Great. So I just happened to ask ChatGPT, like, what “New Year’s resolutions should I pick this year”? And it’s spit out a long list. I’m joking about that.  I’m joking, although it might get to that, what are we talking about today?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Anyway, New Year’s resolutions on ChatGPT.

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, let’s do that.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, no, interestingly, as you bring it up, no, we are going to talk a little bit about AI today, ChatGPT and other stuff around that, especially in relation to the massage and manual therapy world, where it fits in, what kind of things are being done, and what are some some things that are happening in this space,

 

Til Luchau  

interesting and timely topic, and one that there’s lots of different views on. So I can kind of guess how you think and feel about it. You have some interesting tools you’re going to share with us too, I hope, yeah, yeah. Look forward to unfolding that and sharing some ideas as well.

 

Whitney Lowe  

So how? Let’s backtrack a little bit. I mean, just for for people who kind of like following stuff, there was a sort of what’s called the ChatGPT moment, the big unveiling of when a lot of the people’s attention started really getting onto AI, which was around late October 2022 when ChatGPT was released. First of all, let’s, let’s just lay the groundwork out there. Are you a an AI user or an AI refuser, I guess.

 

Til Luchau  

I am a known user, which, back in the 70s, when I was in high school, meant something too.

 

Whitney Lowe  

A little bit different, right?

 

Til Luchau  

Little different, you know, I am. I am a AI user, let’s put it that way. Then, of course, there’s, it’s a mixed bag, perhaps for better or worse, and I look forward to unfolding that. But it was, I think it was actually mid journey. And some of the image stuff that was coming out early on were, did a discord account and just go play with Midjourney, image generation, yeah, tools that really caught my interest because of my interest in anatomy illustrations and the kind of image-heavy aspect of the offerings I give the adaptive offerings, right? It was really cool to see what could be done there pretty quickly. And it’s still the case. As far as I can tell, it’s hard to stick within the guardrails of anatomical accuracy.

 

Whitney Lowe  

I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but I will have to say like we’re moving very fast in that direction. But yeah, we’re not quite there yet.

 

Til Luchau  

Yeah, I remember I published an article in Massage and Bodywork with an illustration from Midjourney, and it’s probably 2020 I don’t remember it was before that 2022 moment. Maybe it was 2021 and it was just this abstract sacrum with wings and in a really kind of expansive.. I love, I love the mood of it, but to try to communicate something specific. And then recently, we’re working a little team here was working like, can we update some of our images and make them even better. Yeah. And we couldn’t get rid of the octopus tentacles and suckers on the vertebrate for some reason to get, like, painting in like little octopus motifs into the bones. And that was kind of interesting visually, but not what we were after.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, you know. And speaking of image generation, I. Had been doing some, I was doing some work on a piece, a blog post piece, I don’t know, couple weeks ago, or something like that, I think. And this is one of the things that I have always struggled with a great deal, is looking around for clip art when I’m trying to illustrate things, for example, around injury conditions. And I went to nano banana, which is Google’s image generator, and just said, like, Hey, make me a picture of a two soccer players playing, and one of them is getting kicked in the shin, and, you know, so and so and so and so. Okay, and boom, there’s your picture. And it was a photographic picture that was, you know, exactly what I needed to illustrate for that article. Like, I won’t know how many hours and hours I would have had to have spent scouring stock photo image libraries to try to find something like that. You know, that would do the same thing. So that kind of stuff is getting pretty, pretty crazy.

 

Til Luchau  

That is pretty crazy, and educators take note. And let’s talk about like practice implications too, for practitioners and their clients. How about you? Where did you first get exposed to it? And how do you and do you use it regularly?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, so I’m a serious Geek on on AI stuff, and use it all the time, every day. And I was, I hadn’t messed around. You know, it’s funny when we talk about, like, when did you start using AI? Anybody who’s been using spell check in their Microsoft Word documents is using AI, good point. So it really has been in with a lot of stuff. It’s just like, to what degree, but the big kind of shift and change with some of these other things, you know, Midjourney in the what was the other? Another image generator thing at that time. See that was really big. Yeah, right. Dolly, dolly, yeah.  So that was the original,  So, but yeah, I started, I started getting involved with shortly after the ChatGPT moment in late October ’22 I think was right after the turn of the year in ’23, I kept hearing a lot of buzz about this thing, like, what is this ChatGPT thing? And so I went and checked it out. And I started thinking and looking at this thing. Oh, man, this is going to change a lot of stuff. I can see, kind of like, where this is going. And so I started looking at a lot of different ways that I might use it, mainly for all kinds of things around stuff in the business, automations, you know, research, you know, analysis of things. And just found, keep finding new and different ways to use it, and then also, you know, finding a lot of ways in which it doesn’t do what it’s cracked up to be, or doesn’t fit the mold of what really is, is good. And unfortunately, it’s, it’s become the kind of thing that’s made it really easy for people to produce a ton of just generic content slop, really easily, and that’s given some degree of it a bad rap, but it’s also able to do some really, really incredible things that I have found with especially in the education realm of what I’m trying to do with with education things.

 

Til Luchau  

So we’re going to dig into that. But how do you what do you think most massage therapists associate with AI? Or what do you find that people are assuming or responding to when they think about it?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, you know what? And I talk about AI a little bit in in some in the classes that I’m in teaching people, and also in our online program, it’s, and always ask, you know, like, what kind of things are you all do it and it’s, it’s pretty common that there’s a lot of people who’ve maybe messed around with it just a little bit, but basically use it like a Google search engine and just like, ask it simple questions, and then they kind of like, Yeah, this is interesting. It doesn’t really do much, though. And then kind of leave it alone and walk away. And I think a lot of that is because a lot of people who are in our field are not overtly drawn to technology naturally and just somewhat kind of shy away from from it and don’t want to get terribly involved with it. But I also try to let people know there’s a lot of ways in which this could help you in managing your business, managing some of your marketing and promotions and doing research and looking up information on client conditions and things like that. So there’s a lot of things that I think it could potentially do, and I think it’s going to start to, it’s going to it’s growing into a place where it’s going to become much more significant in the educational area, first, I think more so than in clinical practice.

 

Til Luchau  

There are there ways that is already influencing us that you don’t think we’re generally aware of?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, I think so. And again, let me put on my educational geek hat for a moment of instructional design and educational things that students necessarily might not be aware of. But as an educator or something that’s been really very critical and important for me is that kind of one of the holy grails of education that I have been pursuing for decades and have never really been able to get to, is what we call personalized learning, which is, if you take, for example, what we’re doing in. Massage and bodywork field, and especially in the continuing continuing education arena, where you have people in a class who just got out of school two months ago, sitting right next to somebody who’s been in practice for 30 years, and your backgrounds and things are very different, but in the classroom, it’s one pace fits all. It’s one group of things that you do and one group of activities that you do in the classroom, and everybody’s doing the same thing. But what if we could get something in an instructional model to meet people where they’re at the person with a very limited background gets a lot of foundational material, and a person with a lot more advanced skills and a great background and a good history can jump up to advanced stuff right away. And that’s one of the things that, to me, is most exciting about what I can see AI potentially doing, especially in the educational area, is the capability to personalize the learning experiences for where you’re currently at and really give you something that’s going to be most helpful and beneficial for you. And I don’t think a lot of students or practitioners will kind of recognize exactly what’s happening there, but they’ll just notice, like, I’m having a much better educational experience here.

 

Til Luchau  

Education, that’s that makes a lot of sense. How about in practice?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, you know, in practice, I don’t know if we’ll see it a lot now, there is some talk and buzz about these massage robots, AI massage robots. And I can’t remember the one of them is called Escape, I think, or something like that. And I don’t remember the names of the other ones that I had heard about. There’s a couple of them that are out there, and everybody’s, you know, it starts that whole thing, oh my gosh. Is, you know, an AI robot going to take my job? And it’s like, I can see those things doing some very basic, rudimentary, general relaxation skills that might feel good, just kind of like, you know, getting on the Alec back in the old days, the old rolling chiropractic tables that has a roller that would roll underneath your back. And like, you know, I can see that these chairs, yeah, chairs, yeah, do that same kind of thing. But again, how does that? How do you adjust, change and deal with things that are, Oh, give me a little bit more pressure right here, you know? Again, like, don’t let up there, a little bit, you know, or the, just the very fact of what is the most powerful thing that happens in the treatment room. Anyway, it’s the client therapist relationship so that I don’t see is going to be replaced any day soon. I think we’re a long, long way from anything like that.

 

Til Luchau  

The massage robot then caught my eye, and the press releases I saw were leveraging the AI angle, and I was, I’m curious, there’s one down. I live in Boulder, about an hour away from me down in Denver, there’s a place that specializes in AI massage. Just curious about just to go down there and experience it. But the more I looked into it, the I don’t this is like very limited background, so please excuse me, anybody who’s an advocate for this stuff, but it looked like AI was the marketing spin on mechanical massage, and the AI aspect, it gets pasted on a lot of things to make it modern and interesting and give it superpowers. When it’s a you know, it’s the same process that started with massage chairs or magic fingers in your old hotel bed, where you lay out and put in a quarter and then the reports I’ve read from people that have had these AI massages are some occasionally surprised at how satisfying it can be and but mostly it’s, you know, not underwhelmed. You could say yeah. One was comparing it to a cow being massaged by a cow chewing the cud some kind of repetitive mechanic. Again, that’s probably unfair to the people that really advocated, and we’ll take it further, but yeah, that’s my takeaway so far.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, I would be curious to talk to somebody who’s using these things in their business, and I can see, as a business owner, feeling like it’s, you know, it’s not gonna call in sick. You know, it’s going to be there every day and hopefully work, but the first time one of those things hurts somebody that’s going to really open up an interesting can of worms, because who is responsible at that point for the inappropriate practice, whatever it did that hurt somebody is this the owner of the business, or is this the maker of the device? You know, there’s a lot of things that I think are potentially challenging, and certainly I don’t think for a lot of what people come to massage and body work experiences, for that unique experience with that particular individual, were way, way long time off from something like that being able to reproduce those things,

 

Til Luchau  

it’s in different episodes. But there’s also instrument-assisted work, and just the rise of massage guns and how much, yeah, how common those are, and that’s actually maybe more relevant to the hands on work than the AI spin.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yes, I would think so. It too. Yeah, I love my massage gun, you know. So, yeah, cool. Oh yeah, like, because, like, when my back hurts at 10 o’clock at night, you know, after working in the yard all day, there’s nobody around, but my massage gun to really do that for me. So, yeah, nice.

 

Til Luchau  

I should remember my massage gun. I’ve been given a couple over the years, and somehow they just kind of languish in my bottom shelf.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, you know, I played around with several of them that they weren’t really good, and I got one that I really like. Now it’s

 

Til Luchau  

so well, well, we’ll come, we’ll contact them, see if they want to be a sponsor.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, Sharper Image. How about it? So, okay. And again, I’m just gonna, like, blatantly say this is really simple as, like, a Costco device, but it just it worked really well, or works really well, so I like it, okay.

 

Til Luchau  

So there’s an implication here for AI saying that isn’t AI just a tool, and like any other tool, it has pluses and minuses. Yap, I

 

Whitney Lowe  

think so. I mean, I certainly envision it that way. And I think there’s a lot of hype clearly around it. I mean, like businesses just jump on their marketing thing and anything they can say with AI, and it makes it sound like they’re on the cutting edge of stuff, but then

 

Til Luchau  

their listeners, you can now say legitimately, that you have listened to an AI informed podcast. There you go. That’s right then that awake. Take it away.

 

Whitney Lowe  

There you go. So, yeah, your AI-infused for your practice. About that?

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, so Whitney, where? Where does AI not belong in massaging manual therapy? Where might it be helpful? How do we sort that through? 

 

Whitney Lowe  

So I think what, where I see people making some of the biggest mistakes is where they they try to broadcast, replace what they’re doing with AI somehow or other, because it can do things. Just doesn’t necessarily mean it can do things. Well, some of that might be, you know, like writing pieces in your blog posts or promotional things that you might do for your practice, you know, yeah, you can churn out a whole bunch of stuff with AI. Doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be, you know, done well, and then you got to check things. Here’s, here’s. The other thing is that, you know, the way AI engines are built, they’re designed to answer inquiries, questions and things that you post them. And it’s a rare day I haven’t had this happen where I’ve asked something of an AI large language model, and it comes back and says, I don’t know what it does instead, is make something up. And oftentimes it’s making this up because it’s putting together. The way they work is they’re pulling together pieces of information from different areas that they think go together, because there’s a statistical likelihood that these words have gone together before in this pattern, and that can end up producing incorrect information, which we call a hallucination. And that’s something that I encourage people to be very careful of, is, you know, you really need to check what’s what’s coming out. On the other end,

 

Til Luchau  

I did a bunch of reading. This is back in the ChatGPT, 3.0 something days. So it’s been a couple years, maybe even but just to try to understand how it was coming up with what it was, and it’s fascinating that the model, at least, that my large language model reasoning, was based on associations in our common body of knowledge, it was basically breaking. Wasn’t even doing syllables, or were, I’m sorry, it wasn’t doing words. It was doing phenomes, parts of words that it would take apart and look to see how often these things went together. Yeah. And then it would predict what would be the next thing that typically would come after whatever it was querying. And so it made me realize that AI was really good at sounding good. Yeah, that was its biggest skills is giving us what we think would be like amazing, and it often wows us with how good it sounds. But like you said, it’s not really always yet based on fact checking. What’s, you know, factual it’s based on what’s gonna get the biggest response from the listener, going, that sounds right, that sounds

 

Whitney Lowe  

And there’s been a lot of talk in the AI community too about its sycophancy. In essence, it’s wanting you to think that what you’re saying is a great idea, like when you ask it, “Hey, should I, you know, start marketing my practice to, you know, corporate CEO executives”, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Well, it’s not really a great idea for a number of different reasons. And so there’s been some pushback in terms of the way they train the models to not be quite so accepting of every idea and like, be a bit more critical and realistic

 

Til Luchau  

before we get to some of the more specifics. Are there any other misunderstandings or fears you see in massage therapy that you want to bring up or think through.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, I mean, I do think that there are fears and concerns that I hear from people feeling like technology is overrunning every aspect of our life, and like, here’s another place where we’re losing tech, you know, losing touch with with technology stuff. And I. There’s some there’s some realistic parts of that, because I think also sometimes an over reliance. And this is something I was listening to a podcast the other day. I think it was people were talking about some studies they had done, saying, like a lot of the office workers who are relying heavily on it, are losing some of their skill edge in some of the things that they used to do, because they’re relying on it so so much. And I think that’s one of the things

 

Til Luchau  

you think, I mean, that’s like, it’s crazy, how easy it makes things and how often I’ll find myself going to the AI tool rather than doing it the old, longhand way that I used to think it through with. So, yeah, yeah. So there’s lots of not just office workers, but I think all of us who use it have to confront that, yeah, like any amazing tool, it helps us do amazing things, and it takes over the work we used to do to accomplish that. I mean, cars, automobiles did that. They made they made us really lazy. They got us places amazingly well, but at a cost.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, right. What about you? Do you see any other things that I’ve missed, concerns or of, yeah, there’s overuse or whatever. 

 

Whitney Lowe  

Well, the dehumanizing, so that we end up relying more on technology and less on touch, the crutch thing where we, like I just mentioned, we go to it because it’s so easy and sounds so good, the overconfidence you’ve mentioned of just relying on what sounds awesome, then there’s, I mean, there’s lots of ethical concerns in the background, like is, you know, do we need to worry about AI getting out of the bottle and taking over the world? And it’s, there’s people that think about a lot more than me, are a lot more worried about that than me. Yeah, I can’t say it’s not nothing, but I’m not really informed there. And I’m not sure personally, I just thought my personal thinking through on that. I’m not sure how to influence that or relate to that. Yeah, me not using ChatGPT wouldn’t slow that process down. Maybe even lobbying on my podcast for people not to do that, I don’t think would slow that process down. Yeah, but there’s some serious attention that needs to be paid to say, the ethical implications of all this powerful, these powerful tools we’re doing,

 

Whitney Lowe  

Oone of the things you mentioned just a moment ago is in terms of, AI taking over and doing certain types of things that we don’t intend. You know, there’s a there’s a move we’re getting very close to. And some people say we’ve reached the point of what’s called Artificial General Intelligence, where AI is capable of doing things at the level of a human at a certain point, and then after that, the next day, stage is artificial super intelligence, where AI becomes more capable than humans in doing certain types of things. And one of the really interesting sort of philosophical questions about this is because we’re talking about something developing a skill that is above and beyond what we humans can do. We don’t have any idea what it might be capable of doing and what it might be able to do, and that that is one of the places where I think it is scary. And one other thing I just want to point into this is not really, you know, massage. Profession specific, but just about it in general, is like, and this is, this is a moral dilemma that I have to battle with and figure out, is that, as somebody who is very concerned about environmental factors, it is a horrendous energy consumer, and just going to continue to be doing that, you know, both Yap energy consumption and also, you know, it’s going to lead to lots and lots of more mining of rare earth minerals for all these chips that have got to run these things in the future, and all these data centers and all this kind of stuff. It just, it’s that constant, you know, exploding snowball of of consumption of resources to keep this thing going.

 

Til Luchau  

It’s this was not recently, maybe six months ago. The comparison I read was generating an image and Chat GPT is about like microwaving a cup of coffee for a minute in terms of the amount of electricity it gets used. Interesting, yeah, and that’s, and that’s, again, that’s pretty rough and pretty approximate. And according to my, one of my main sources information, my son, who follows this and keeps me informed that that’s a big deal, and in the field, that they’re some of the edges that some of the Chinese companies, or ChatGPT itself has had is more efficient energy use, but still, it’s vast the amount of energy it’s being consumed. For our queries,

 

Whitney Lowe  

The first time I heard about this, was a new story a couple years ago, when I heard Microsoft was talking about buying Three Mile Island or something like that. I’m like, What is. Going on here, like the nuclear facility, yeah, you know. And so, like, if, if computer companies are buying nuclear power plants. And this is something, this is something that’s got some serious ramifications here.

 

Til Luchau  

While we’re on the question of reservations, there’s also the kind of bias, or lowest common denominator reinforcement that comes from feeding on existing knowledge to generate new answers stay within the scope of what’s already been talked about, and it amplifies the averages in a way that the commonality of them and doesn’t really help us jump out of stereotypes or boxes or biases there.

 

Whitney Lowe  

And that’s why, you know the human in the loop, as they refer to it, is still critically important for people to to not just give it over to everything there.

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, so where, where do you think AI has the potential to improve our manual therapy, our critical thinking, say, or does it, you know? Is it going to do that? Is it just can become a crutch? How do you think that through? What do you think

 

Whitney Lowe  

about that? Well, I do think that there are some ways in which, for example, I think it can be extremely beneficial for a lot of people in our field. Just as an example, in our education and training. We aren’t really trained in academic models, so it lot of practitioners when we constantly say, like, hey, it’s important to read research and keep up with things that are being published in journals and all that kind of stuff. A lot of folks look at a medical journal article and it’s just like, Oh, my God. This is just like, over my head. I can’t do it, and then just put it away and never pay attention to it. Here the capability for AI, for example, to coalesce, curate large amounts of data with, you know, hundreds of medical journal articles on a particular topic and synthesize them and tell them, tell me, what’s the overall consensus among these many different articles? That’s something we just take, would have taken researchers, you know, days or weeks to do, and now it can be done in a matter of minutes. And that makes a lot of that kind of stuff more a whole lot more accessible to clinical practitioners. And to me, that makes some of what you might be wanting to get access to when you had a client with a particular condition, you don’t know what you should be doing. That kind of stuff is helpful to be able to help us out. That’s a real positive direction, for example, of where I see it working really well.

 

Til Luchau  

So what responsibility do we have as educators, podcasters, thinkers, in shaping how AI is being introduced, is getting into our field,

 

Whitney Lowe  

you know, I think for especially for us as educators, you know, this is kind of interesting. And I think you and I had a discussion about this at one point a little while back too about, you know, looking at what happened with AI in the academic community when it came out, there were all of these organizations, you know, schools, organizations, colleges and universities, even some of them banning ChatGPT and banning AI, because it was so easy to use it to cheat to, you know, write it, write your papers for you, and produce your academic content. And it’s one of those things like, I think that’s really the wrong approach, because you’re not going to put the cap on something like this that is this transformative and has this kind of power. What you’re going to model, yeah, what you’re going to do basically, is stifle the students that you are training to go out in the workforce to where they’re going to have to use these tools, and all sudden, you know you’re not training them to use these tools appropriately. So I think what, what could happen out of this, what should happen out of this is, for educators, is it changes our way of really thinking about education and how we train people for things, and maybe, like, find some ways to creatively use some of these tools responsibly. And maybe it’s time for us to, kind of, like, give up on the college essay, you know, maybe that’s not really the best learning tool, you know,

 

Til Luchau  

interesting, yeah, I do some, you know, it’s hiring people to work in our organization. I do do a couple work samples, and pretty clearly, within the last year, more use getting a lot of AI generated stuff back. So what I started asking was tell me the prompts you use to get your answer. So I was essentially asking them to use the tools and to tell me how they’re using the tools. Yeah, I don’t know that’s again, there’s people that think much harder and broader than I do about this, but this is a one of the transitions we’re thinking about, like, how do we use these tools in a way that’s skillful? Yeah, I

 

Whitney Lowe  

think it’s kind of a corollary to that is the way in which things change dramatically when the. Internet became a thing, and we were able to communicate and interact on this vast, larger scale that we weren’t able to do before it changed a lot of things. And, and there were some people that were, you know, calling it, you know, the not a really good thing at that point. And, but it’s, it was a lot slower actually, I think, in becoming just an integral, irreplaceable part of people’s lives, which it has now become, AI is moving way, way faster than that, in terms of true its influence.

 

Til Luchau  

Each one of these new tools has upped the pace of adoption too, whether it was the internet or voicemail. Was one, voicemail changed the way things were happening for that. Again, automobiles, there’s this history of technology and how they escalating pace of what’s going on. Yeah, all right, let’s talk about the Clinical Massage coach. I’m really curious about this.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, so this is a tool that I kind of like stumbled on this idea when I was doing some work in our programs with, I was building out some interactive chat bot case studies in our online programs, where, again, the back to the whole idea of personalized education. The way our programs used to be built is at the end of the program, end of each course, there was a case study that I had to build out with, you know, individual slides with branching scenarios to help teach clinical reasoning to students. And the problem is, it’s only one case, and everybody has the same case, and you just go through it once, and then you’re done. Then I recognized, with AI, we could build interactive case studies that would teach people content in the course. And again, the the case study is based on the information in the course only. It does not the chat bot doesn’t go out to the rest of the the internet and pull all this information there. And after building some of those case studies, I started thinking like, Well, I think there could actually be the potential benefit of an even larger tool that’s not just designated suggest this course alone. But what about, what if? What could be the ideal tool for a clinical practitioner who’s faced with something where, let’s say, you know, a client comes in with a particular condition, they don’t have a lot of information about it. They want some help treatment planning. They want to help, you know, some help in understanding what the nature of that problem is, and and want to help, you know, figuring some of this stuff out. And, you know, part of this thing, I talk about this in kind of a joking fashion, but this kind of came out too. Of a number of times I was in the classroom with people talking, we’d be, you know, going through stuff in a workshop and covering a whole lot of information over a two day course, and people would come up and say to me, is like, Man, I wish I could just download your brain and have it there in my pocket or something like that. And I thought, now you can we figured out a way to actually do that. So the the coach was the Clinical Massage coach is what we call this tool, and it’s, it is based on a specific, curated knowledge base. It does not search the entire web for its content. I curate all of the information that it’s trained on so that I can validate that this is, in fact, accurate information, and give it those appropriate guardrails and give it, you know, restrictions, like you do not ever diagnose things you know. Don’t do this, don’t do that, because if you just ask chat, GPT, something like that, you can get all kinds of crazy stuff and some really wacky ideas, because it’s searching the entire web of published material. So that’s kind of the idea of what we wanted to do. And then it has also evolved into, again, what I thought would be helpful in a clinical environment, especially for those people dealing with pain and injury complaints, is that it’s, you know, you’ve you spend a lot of time doing unpaid work, like writing SOAP Notes or trying to write, you know, narrative reports that you might send to a referring healthcare professional. And we’ve programmed the coach, so that you can just put your shorthand from a treatment session in there, and it will generate a comprehensive, detailed, professionally accurate soap note. And then you can take that soap note material, in fact, and then ask it to generate a narrative report that can be sent to a referring physician. Or can you can send an email out to your clients saying, Hey, here’s what we did this session. Here’s what we’re going to be working on the next session. Just wanted to remind you of what we’ve done. Thanks again. So much for coming in, blah, blah, blah or whatever.

 

Til Luchau  

So that’s really interesting. I mean, you’ve mentioned this tool to me before, but we haven’t had a chance to talk about it. So yes, like my brain is expanding. So okay, so do you when I use this tool. I get Whitney Lowe’s brain in my pocket. You and you, you use. It’s like a practitioner facing tool. So I might use this before after a session to understand what’s going on. It might help me plan for the session, but it might actually help me generate the soap nodes and the client follow up or communications,

 

Whitney Lowe  

yeah, and similar to what you were asking about before, in terms of, like, does it just spit out information? One of the other things that I programmed it to do is not just spit out information, but actually engage in Socratic dialog. So you know, when you put in information about something, it might ask you to reflect on this and, you know, and ask these questions, or like, Have you explored this? Or like, have you cleared and make sure you don’t have this red flag? So this is something that just your general large language model, like chat GPT, will not necessarily do.

 

Til Luchau  

So you’ve spun it as an educator to try to help it. Help it. Help practitioners reason, rather than just read off the script that they’re getting through.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Exactly. So again, an educational tool is always the driving force for me, behind what this thing is about. It’s, you know, an administrative help in a number of different areas. But also, most importantly, a good educational tool is not just going to make you be relying on it as a crutch, because it’s going to make you think it’s going to make you have to answer some or think about things the way you you inquire with it.

 

Til Luchau  

Well, that’s a difference from just Googling a question or just plugging it into chatGPT or something like that. Any other there must be other differences, other differences you want to highlight.

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, so again, some of the other things that you can ask it to help you with treatment planning, you know, or you can ask it to give you a simulated case study on a particular type of thing. So there’s all kinds of things that you might potentially ask for it. And you can ask it business advice and things like that. So it can be sort of a mentor on a lot of different topics that are relevant for Clinical Massage practitioners to really help them in all facets of their practice.

 

Til Luchau  

Business advice, yeah, interesting. Okay, so what kind of therapists did you have in mind when you’re designing it? Who would benefit the most is it for students, entry level people, old timers like me, yeah,

 

Whitney Lowe  

it’s good, you know, I think it could be potentially useful for all those different groups on sort of different levels. Mainly, it was designed for clinical practitioners who are in practice, and more aimed toward those individuals working with pain and injury conditions, so working sort of as healthcare approaches to massage and manual therapy as opposed to, like, general relaxation and wellness type of things. So it’s it’s curated knowledge base is specifically aimed more towards using massage and manual therapy as a healthcare strategy. So, but practitioners of all levels, the person right out of school is going to find it valuable, because it’s going to help them bridge some of that confidence gap that they feel like. They go to school, they learn things, and they get on practice like, oh my god, I realize you start to realize how much you don’t know, and you’re now don’t really have that support network behind you that you used to have in school, and you go to a continuing education class when weekend is in great class, you get all motivated, but then where do you go when you have questions, they come up after you’ve gone home. So it can certainly be helpful for that kind of thing. And I tried to design the interface to be as easy and intuitive as possible so the sort of technophobic folks who don’t like technology can also find it really valuable and helpful in what they’re doing. Okay?

 

Til Luchau  

So you’ve talked a little bit about the scope questions. You’re helping steer people within the scope and not diagnosing things like that. Other guardrails there that you’re thinking about as you design this and program it,

 

Whitney Lowe  

yeah, so I try to also, you know, think a lot about red flags, cautions and contraindications and things like that that were, you know, if somebody’s asking a question, because I did this, I did a lot of testing with this, just asking chatGBT and Claude and Gemini questions in general, and seeing what kind of information came back. You know, I got some suggestions for treatment methods and treatment strategies. I felt like, I don’t necessarily think that’s a good idea, or this might be a good idea with somebody is at this particular stage of their rehabilitation, but not at this early stage here. So that’s one of the big things, is that a lot of information gets presented as sort of treatment protocol guidelines that doesn’t specify really the nature of where somebody is at this different stage. And that’s one of the things that I think is important as a guardrails and recognize might do something here at one stage, but not necessarily another, and it’s encouraged to help people think through that process.

 

Til Luchau  

How about privacy? Any, any thinking there about how what we’re asking, how you’re designing this tool that supports privacy?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, so it is. People are reminded frequently not to put any personally-identifying client information in there. I mean, you can ask about a client case, but don’t use a person’s name any personally-  what’s called personally identifying information, because we want you know we don’t have the level of security that can can assure that all of that information would ever stay private. Now, it doesn’t your your individual communications with it don’t get shared with anybody. But just just as a precaution, we encourage people don’t ever share any of that personally identifiable information with anybody. And again, what you communicate with and what you say and talk with with the coach doesn’t get sent back out to, you know, chatGPT or the Gemini or to the internet to train its models and everything else that stays within that closed system. So it’s a it’s a pretty sequestered process.

 

Til Luchau  

There you mentioned, doing some validating already. How do what are your plans for, evolving it, refining it as you go forward?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Well, it’s a constant for me. It’s a constant process of further curating the knowledge base in which it’s built on. You know, doing like what I do is I go and look up large numbers of medical journal articles on particular conditions that are relevant for manual therapy approaches, read those, vet those, and then certain of those articles would get coalesced and curated into the detailed knowledge base. And so, I mean, we’ve got, like, a lot of different conditions that I want to eventually cover that aren’t in there yet, that we will continue to build that out and make it more robust. And also, you know, talking to our user base over the course of the next, you know, years, or whatever find like, How are people using it? What do you want it to be able to do that it can’t do? Or what do you find most useful? And just listen to people and see where, where it could potentially evolve and and right now, it’s, it’s a it is inside our learning management system for people who are enrolled in our orthopedic medical massage specialist certificate program. But also want to eventually look at the possibility of for those people who have that access to it, to for it to be a an app that is secure but lives could live on their phone, so they could just pick it up, look at it and interact with it directly on their phone. And I

 

Til Luchau  

guess so right now it’s available to people in your program, yeah, but not yet as a standalone tool, yeah. Okay, so what’s a What’s an example of how it might guide someone through, like a complex pain case, or how a change could have changed the approach there?

 

Whitney Lowe  

So let’s say some of you, somebody comes in with a particular pain complaint, you could present it when they present the coach with those symptoms and say, like, the person has got, you know, shoulder pain when they do these things, what kinds of things should I be thinking about? It’s not going to give you one particular answer, but it might say, I would look at like, all of these different possibilities. Do you want to explore some of them in more detail? And you could just say yes, and it might say, well, how, what were the results from your range of motion evaluations? Oh, I didn’t really do that. Well, okay, go do that first, and then come back and tell me what you found. And then we’ll narrow that down a little bit further. So it is going to kind of help prod you to be more thorough and comprehensive in what you’re doing with your evaluation process, to come at things, and then you can construct a more appropriate treatment plan based on the good information that you’ve really gathered there about it.

 

Til Luchau  

I’m you mentioned shoulder pain. I want to try it. I mean, not to be too psychopathic myself here. But you’ve, you’ve piqued my interest. And I’ve, I’ve had a shoulder challenge of my own that I’ve been playing with and learning about, and I’m very curious

 

Whitney Lowe  

to Yeah, okay, we’ll get you in there. Let’s let you do that. Yeah, for sure.

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, what else do you want us to know about it before we begin to wrap up? Well, I

 

Whitney Lowe  

would just say this is, this is an example. I think of some ways in which AI can have a real positive impact for practitioners. I have gotten a lot of feedback from people who’ve been working with it saying, like, this is really interesting. It’s really helping me a lot. Helping me a lot. And so I just, I want to try to hear from more people, like, how they how they want to use it, what they want it to do, what kind of things can they feel like they can get from it to to really be making a much more effective clinical tool. My goal was to try to, you know, find something that can help deal with a lot of the key pain points that clinical practitioners have. One is that knowledge gap of not really having all the information that they need accessible to them and the whole decision making process. And the other part of this is there’s a lot of unpaid hours doing paperwork and all that kind of stuff that practitioners have to go through, and this can really help them in a lot of those different strategies, so fascinating.

 

Til Luchau  

Well, I hope you’ll keep us apprised as we go forward. How would you suggest people go learn more about it? If they want to do that?

 

Whitney Lowe  

Yeah, they can absolutely learn more about it on our website at Academy of clinical massage.com just click on the the link to our certificate program. Send us some information about the Clinical Massage coach in there, and then, of course, they’re welcome to email me any questions that they have about it. Whitney at Academy of clinical massage.com and happy to answer questions or let you have some guidance about how it might be helpful for you.

 

Til Luchau  

Fascinating. I want to hear from our listeners what they find there, but also their general thoughts about our discussion today, because we started with talking about AI in general, pluses, minuses, how it could be helpful, how it could be detrimental to what we’re doing. I want to hear from listeners about the how they’re using AI, how they think about it, why they don’t use it, that kind of thing. And then we, you know, we keep returning to this idea that what really matters is the human parts of what we do, and that’s just a given, but that should be said here toward the end to presence, touch, consent relationship and the clinical judgment, and then the in the moment, decision making we’re making as people are very much parts of what we’re doing. And that’s that’s what we’re contrasting to these impressive tools that are evolving,

 

Whitney Lowe  

It always comes back to, kind of like my big picture, 30,000 foot mission. And goal behind all this is, my goal is to help reduce pain in the world. And this is just a tool that will help, you know, this I’m talking about AI in general, you know, is a tool that will help us get there. But at the end of the day, a lot of it is just, is really about you developing yourself as a practitioner and the work that you do individually with your client. And so there’s some things out there that can help you do your work better, and so that you can have a long career helping lots of people improve the quality of their lives as well. So that’s that’s my hope, a big hope for it.

 

Til Luchau  

Thank you for that, Whitney and you and I as AI friendly people, are excited about this, but I’m serious. I want to hear from the listeners who say we should never touch AI or whatever, whatever the other points of view is. I want to hear about that, but I really am very curious to see how this evolves. And you’ve put some work into this. It’s fascinating to think about as a reasoning partner, as opposed to a script generator or something

 

Whitney Lowe  

like that, indeed. So we’ll see where it goes.

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, let’s so we think our our outgoing sponsor, let’s do the thinking practitioner podcast is proudly supported by ABMP,  Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals, the premier association for dedicated massage and bodywork practitioners like you. When you join ABMP, you’re not just getting industry leading liability insurance, you’re gaining practical resources designed to support your career, from free, top tier continuing education and quick reference apps like Pocket Pathology and Five-Minute muscles. ABMP equips you with the tools you need to succeed and grow your practice,

 

Whitney Lowe  

and ABMP is committed to elevating the profession with expert voices, fresh perspectives and invaluable insights through their CE courses, the ABMP podcast and Massage and Bodywork magazine featuring industry leaders like my co host til and myself and thinking practitioner listeners like you can get exclusive savings on ABMP  at membership@abmp.com/thinking. So join the best and expect more from your professional association and thank you again to all of our listeners and our sponsors, you can stop by our sites for video, show notes, transcripts and any extras. You can find that over on my site at Academy of clinical massage.com til where can people land on your site and explore things with you,

 

Til Luchau  

all this podcast stuff and all the things I offer are advanced dash trainings.com and I mean, we want to hear from you listeners, your input about the show in general this episode, you can email us at info, at the thinking practitioner.com, if you use AI to generate your email to us, just let it. Let me know what prompts you fed it to get your Yeah, to get the response that you’re sending us. I want to hear all that. And you can look for us on social media and YouTube under our names. My name Til Luchau. Whitney Lowe. What is your name?

 

Whitney Lowe  

My name is Whitney Lowe and you can find us over there as well. We would appreciate it also if you could rate us on Spotify or Apple podcast. It actually really does help other people find the show, and we want to keep doing this. So please take a few seconds to do that, and thanks again for all, as always, for listening, sharing the word and telling, do tell a friend. So we’ll see you in the next episode.

 

Til Luchau  

Thanks buddy. Thanks for today. See ya. Everybody. Okay, sounds good?