The Problem With Data-Only Healing

In this episode, we unpack one of the biggest gaps in modern healthcare: the lack of space for subjectivity in a system built on measurement. We explore what data does incredibly well, where it starts to fall short in healing, and why your lived experience, nervous system, and intuition are forms of information that deserve to be considered. This is a conversation about science, subjectivity, and what happens when we only validate what we can quantify.

In this episode:
Why science is designed to remove subjectivity — and why that matters
What data and Western medicine do exceptionally well (acute care, emergency medicine, safety, standardization)
The difference between staying alive and actually feeling well
Why healing is layered and harder to measure than survival
The “dangerous leap” — equating “hard to measure” with “not real”
Neuroplasticity as an example of science evolving beyond previous limits
The history of stress as “soft science” and its now undeniable impact on the body
The gut-brain axis: not new, but rediscovered through modern science
How medicine shifted from holistic to reductionist with advancements in measurement
Why older forms of “data” (clinical observation, lived experience) were deprioritized
HVLA training and the concept of “gold standard” research
Safety vs effectiveness in research and education

Summit takeaway: “You are not a statistic. Your experience is data — even if it doesn’t fit into a study.”

If this episode resonated, share it with someone who might need it. 

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National Library of Medicine Article: 

​​https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6225396/#:~:text=Without%20in%20any%20way%20refuting,'%20%5B7%2C8%5D.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Summit of Deck, where science meets soul and you don't have to pick one or the other. Hi, I'm your host, Elena Crocker, osteopathic manual practitioner and wiking after teacher. On the pod, we're talking about body wisdom, energy, intuition, and becoming an expert on your own feeling. Whether you're looking to find yourself again, create a new version, or see, just here for the results, you're in the right place. I'm here to demystify spiritual curiosities while adding a layer of humanness to the healthcare experience. No gatekeeping, no pedestals. This podcast is for the woman who is ready to take her power back. Let's do it! Hello everyone, happy Wednesday! Okay, today's episode came from one of those moments where something gets said to you and you just kind of stop and go like, wait a second. Because I've now had the same conversation three times in two weeks. And whenever that happens, you guys know I'm like, okay, this is an episode. So today's theme is that there is a massive issue with how we use data in healthcare. And more specifically, there's no room for subjectivity in a system that is trying to measure literally everything. I obviously this podcast is a week late for those of you who listen weekly. I went down such a rabbit hole of research, and that's the beauty of a podcast is I probably have five podcasts episodes that could come out of this episode, but I know I have to rein it back in and just talk about what matters. But there's there's so much around this topic. Firstly, I was at an acupuncture appointment and my acupuncturist who is very, very data-driven, so much so that sometimes it's surprising to me that she works in alternative healthcare and is so science, like data-driven, which I freaking love. That's why I go to her. But she said something that stuck with me. So we were talking about um something I had experienced, and she goes, There's no data to support it, like, but I know it works. And then she said the same thing about um uh homeopathy and and saying, like, there's no strong data, but clinically she sees results all the time. And I remember like thinking, this is such a weird place to land as a practitioner, to know something works and also know you cannot prove it in the way the system is built for you to prove it. So then I'm listening to Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, and he's interviewing him and Monica are interviewing Michael Poland about consciousness. It's actually a really great episode, you should listen to it. But Dax says something along the lines of as he's gotten older, he's realizing that science doesn't account for emotion and that there's no space for subjectivity in the way we study things. Mic drop. Yes. Yes, Dax. That is exactly it. That is literally where my work lives. And it so fired me up to hear someone as mainstream as Dax Shepherd talking about it. And for those of you listening to the podcast, you are probably live in this realm because you're listening to me talk about it all the time. But for something like Armchair Expert, who probably gets like a million downloads a week and they're not in the realm of alternative healthcare, that was huge. That was really, really big. So that was exciting because science is designed to remove subjectivity. Okay, science relies on controlled variables, repeatability, and measurable outcomes. That is its strength. But healing, the process of healing is inherently subjective. Pain is subjective, we talk about that all the time. Energy is subjective, emotional experience is subjective, even perception of improvement is subjective. So that's where science struggles. And we've really mistaken hard to measure to equate to it's not real. Osteopathy, hard to measure, reiki energy work, hard to measure, intuition can't measure. Placebo, there is actual scientific proof that the brain changes physiologically with the placebo effect. Again, a whole episode for another day. But I'm really jazzed up because it's like, it's happening. Start the car. Beyond the walls of my clinic and a few other mainstream teachers, we are starting to hit the edge of what science can explain and becoming okay with it. And dare I say, friends, leaning into it. So let's start with what data does really well. Because we are not anti-data or anti-Western medicine. We love them. Data is incredibly powerful. It saves lives every freaking day. When we look at what data does really well, it's things like acute care, emergency medicine, life-saving interventions. If you're in a car accident, if you have a severe infection, if you need surgery, you want the system, the data system, standardization, tested, proven. You want protocols, you want precision. You want something that has been measured and repeated over and over and over again. And that is where Western medicine is unmatched. Infectious control, pharmacology, surgical intervention, these are areas where data is essential and there is literally no room for error because standardization does keep people safe when we need it. It allows practitioners across the world to follow the same protocols to reduce risk and make fast life-saving decisions that we absolutely need as human beings. But we can also extend that to life-saving medicine beyond acute care. And when we look at disease intervention and protocols, data and standardization help us fight cancers, disease, chronic conditions. But I feel like this is a point where it starts to like maybe doesn't fully capture the entire picture of healing. Because when you think about it, staying alive and actually feeling well or alive in your body, those are not always the same thing. And where things start to get a little bit more complicated is when we move out of survival, just staying alive, and we're moving into the realm of long-term healing. Because saving a life and understanding why someone is not thriving, they are very different things. Acute care is about clarity. There's a problem, we fix it. But healing is layered. It's not just about what's happening in the tissue, it's about the person inside of that tissue experiencing it. And this is where things get really hard to measure. Osteopathy is a perfect example. In osteopathy, we see this all the time. You can take the exact same technique, apply it to 10 different people, and you'll get 10 completely different outcomes. Even if we're talking about the same practitioner. So same hands, same approach, same body part, different result. And that's because you're not just treating structure. You're treating a nervous system, you're treating a history, you're treating a lifestyle, and you're actually treating a belief system. The person matters more than the technique. So if we look at the nervous system, we see the same thing with pain. Two people can have the exact same injury, and one of them is completely fine, like unfazed, where the other one is in debilitating pain, like other side of the spectrum. And the difference here is their nervous system. It's what state are they in, their past experiences, and their unique perception of what's happening. That's not something that you can isolate and quantify in a study, but it's very freaking real when you're sitting across from somebody in clinic. That person is real, their experience is real. What they're feeling, that pain is real. And then we look at something like energy work, where it becomes way harder to measure because you're not working with things that show up on a scan. But you are seeing, I see, I know tons of energy workers who see consistent outcomes. People feel different. They are able to process things they couldn't, they couldn't process before. Their symptoms are shifting or getting better, eliminating. And at what point do we ask, if a hundred people are telling you something has helped them, at what point do we start paying attention to that? Or let's even say, at what point can the medical field, the Western medical field, say, hey, this could help? Or even less than that. They don't even have to say this could help. They can acknowledge that this type of work is helping the people in front of them alongside Western medicine. Because we know that a big part of healing as well is being seen and heard and validated. Being a participant in your healing journey is and not just being passive. That is important. There is actual data on that. Patient, a lot, there is a lot of data on this. Patients who feel their treatment journey is participatory are more likely to see expected results with the exact same treatment protocol than those who feel like their treatment plan is being dictated to them. I actually wrote a blog post on this on my website that has all of the data. Because here's the leap we've made in science. We've built a system that says if this cannot be measured to a specific standard, it is not valid. And that's not true. That is not freaking true. It just means it's harder to study. And history shows us that it means it doesn't mean that it's not valid. If we look at history to quantifying data, it's telling us the tools at the time are not advanced enough yet to quantify it the way the system's asking it to quantify it to make it as proof. So neuroplasticity is a good example. Neuroplasticity wasn't always accepted. There was a time not long ago where science believed the adult brain could not change. Like once you reached a certain age, that's it. You're fixed, you're done. No new neurons, no rewiring. And to add to that, if you had some sort of brain damage, that was permanent. Like all and any damage was permanent. And then there's researches, researchers like uh Paul Bacharita started showing that stroke patients could actually regain function because the brain was able to reorganize itself. And in the late 90s, study confirmed something even bigger. The adult brain can grow new neurons, which previously was like absolutely can't happen. And this flipped decades of accepted science upside down. And now neuroplasticity is fundamental, foundational. Like you go into indigo, and there's a million books in the front on neuroplasticity and how you can rewire your brain. And we actually like base entire rehabilitation models on it. So the question becomes: what are we currently dismissing today that we just don't have the tools to measure yet? Like neuroplasticity. Even look at this, because you guys are gonna laugh because it's all over your Instagram feeds. Stress affecting the body was once considered a soft science. So for a long time, medicine separated the mind, so emotions and stress in the body, organs, tissues, and pathology, those were two separate things. They didn't interrelate, they couldn't affect each other. So anything emotional was seen as vague, unmeasurable, and less legitimate. There was early research in the 1930s to 1950s, and endocrinologist Hans Selia, he's considered the father of stress research. He introduced the concept of um chronic stress can lead to organ damage, immune suppression, and disease. But at the time, this was still seen as theoretical and not clinically central. So not until the 1970s to 1990s, as research advanced, we could start measuring things like cortisol, your stress hormone, adrenal response, heart rate variability, HRV, everybody's all over that today, rightfully so, we love it. But not until they had tools to measure that did stress become quantifiable, which is when medicine started saying, hey, oh yeah, stress affects everything in the body. So the mind-body connection becomes undeniable after we have the tools to measure these things. Those key researchers, uh Robert Sapolsky, he showed that chronic stress impacts the brain, especially the hippocampus. We've talked about that on other episodes, memory and mood regulation. So his work demonstrated that chronic stress literally changes brain structure and function. There's so many books about that. I know people are kind of debating it now, the body keeps a score, but it's a very good book to understand how this works. There's so, there's so many good books on this. Um, psycho neuroimmunology. This field shows how uh psychological stress, nervous system, and immune system, how they are all connected. The findings show that chronic stress equals increased inflammation, suppressed immune function, and slower healing. We know this. We literally know this to be true. They were talking about in the 1930s, but we had to wait all this time to be like, oh yeah, they were right. So the ACE study in 1998, one of the most important studies in modern medicine. So the CDC and Kaiser Penante looked at adverse childhood experiences. So they found a direct correlation between early life stress and heart disease, cancers, autoimmune conditions, and mental health disorders. So the more stress or trauma a young person had in their childhood, the higher risk of disease. So let's fast forward to 2026. Now we acknowledge this and we're seeing an explosion of nervous system regulation, breath work, cold exposure, somatic therapy, vagus nerve work. Why? Because now we understand you cannot separate the nervous system from physical health. So the thing that used to be called soft science is now literally one of the most dominant conversations in health. And it brings me to another subject, flooding your newsfeed, and again, rightfully so, but the gut brain connection. It was dismissed when people were talking about it in the 1800s, and now it's everywhere. Actually, we're gonna dig deeper on that because it's not that it was dismissed. It's gonna prove my point of why we can't just rely on specific data. But the gut brain connection is not new. So in the 1800s, doctors already believed emotions affect the gut, the gut affect emotions. So I'm gonna link this article from the National Library of Medicine. It's such an interesting read, and this is where I really got lost down my rabbit hole. But summed up, they use different language. Um, they you they say nervous sympathy, but the idea is the same. So back then they treated the body as a system, not separated into parts. Very much how we osteopaths see the body. I always say the body's a closed-loop system, it's a circle, we see it as one, and that these systems interact with each other, not they're not separate of each other. So they treat the body as systems, not part, and then medicine evolved and it got better tools, and we could measure things, and we could dissect, isolate, and test. And that was a really big advancement, but in that shift, we started to break the body into pieces to understand it better. And in doing that, we lost how those pieces talk to each other. So previously, medicine used to be holistic by default. Doctors looked at the whole person, constitution, lifestyle, emotions. Constitution is a really big thing we talk about in osteo. It's very important to understand somebody's constitution and vitality. And those doctors also didn't separate mind and body, okay? Much like the Semicollective. The body was treated as a system, not parts. So then when science got better tools, anatomy became dissecting organs, physiology became just like isolating functions, surgery treated very specific locations, and lab medicine became like measuring chemicals. And this created reductionism, breaking the body into parts to study it more precisely. We started to lose the ability to see the body as a whole because it segmented the healthcare system. There are still pros to that, guys, because we did have so many advancements on certain parts and functions. We learned a lot, but we kind of lost the plot. So in England in the 1800s, and I'm gonna digress here because I went down a huge rabbit hole of research, had to dial back out. Breaking it down simply, what stood out most to me in this era was, and physicians at the time have whole entire books written about the linkages to the gut-brain connection, one of which I'm working through as an e-reader, published in 1829. But the concept of the gut brain axis really stood out to me because the English diet started to become more artificial with the Industrial Revolution and the mass consumption of alcohol. So the Industrial Revolution allowed food to be made cheaper and become more accessible to lower socio socioeconomic classes. So previously, you were only seeing like a gut issue, gut dysbiosis, whatever, in the wealthy because they would over-indulge and eat themselves silly because they could afford it. But then with the Industrial Revolution and access to more like um more artificial foods, and it became cheaper, and there was more access to different types of foods that maybe you weren't growing or basic foods. During this time, there was a high rate of suicide and mental distress in the lower socioeconomic classes, specifically in the brutal winter months. Um, but there does exist data related to those who commit suicide to having gut dysbiosis and the linkages between gut health and mental state. They were saying, like these classes, this lower class before, they weren't going through this um the mental illness that they were at the time when they didn't have access to this cheap man-made food. But as time went on, that data or the version of that data that the physicians were collecting at that time became delegitimized because then we started looking at the stomach as like acid levels, lesions, all ulcers, instead of how does stress affect digestion and how do emotions change the body, and then flip that how does digestion affect the emotions? Because you're changing the body's digestion when you're introducing this new class of food that previously they didn't have before. And it's not that those ideas were wrong that those physicians had. I mean, I think we can all listen to this and be like, oh my God, they were so right, and we're seeing this now in 2026 because we eat shit food. But at the time, they didn't fit into the new model of what counts as data, so it got pushed aside. So that data was dismissed, um, it was labeled unscientific, even though they were all they were based strictly on consistent observation. So they're in clinic and lived data, but we ignored it because it didn't fit the new definition of data. So old data look like patient experience, patterns observed over time, practitioner insight, and subjective reports. I don't know, guys, those all sound like pretty good things to me. And new data became measurable, repeatable, and quantifiable. So the shift wasn't this doesn't meet our new standard of proof, which in my opinion is still bullshit, but the argument isn't like I hate science, it's science changed what is considered valid evidence. And in doing that, it temporarily lost a bigger picture in the healing context. So I actually saw this play out in real time when I went to the US to learn HVLA, which is a chiropractic technique. And I am not anti-Cairo. Please, Kairos, don't come at me, don't hate me. I I just have beef with the institutionalized teaching of the modality than the modality itself. And again, I was only there for a short period. It was not chiropractic college. I cannot speak to that. I'm just speaking to this very specific course. So I went down to understand HVLA in osteopathy. We don't use HVLA, which stands for high voltage, low amplitude. We use different ways of tissue manipulation to treat that deep layer. So that deep layer we'd be referring to is called bony articular, and you're dealing with ligamentous tissue. And why it triggered me to go do this was because I went through a couple of month period where I was getting patients who were getting hurt from chiropractic care. And from my intake with these patients, it felt like a lot of red flags were ignored for that type of thrust from my understanding of what that technique is. But me being me, I needed to understand HVLA from an institution who teaches it to know what really hurt these patients. Because I'm like, maybe my view is biased as an osteopath, and I need to go immerse myself in HVLA to understand were red flags ignored? Maybe I don't understand this technique, I gotta go learn about it. So I get there and I thought we were gonna spend most of the time learning the technique, practicing, talking about body mechanics, anatomy, um, you know, what we're feeling in people's bodies, getting feedback, what would be red flags? No. A huge portion, like the majority. Of the portion of learning was lecture-based, and it wasn't even on how the technique works, it was the data behind why it was safe, not effective, why it was safe. We spent more time learning why it won't hurt someone than understanding how it helps them. And how we did that was reading research abstracts on what they call gold standard. So if you've never heard of gold standard before, it basically means that the best type of research we currently have to test something. This is the best that we have at the moment to test this thing. Usually that's something like a randomized control trial when you try to control as many variables as possible so you can isolate one thing and see if it works. So they were isolating the HVLA technique and seeing if it works. And that is important. That's how we determine safety, that's how we create standards, that's how we protect people. But in this instance, these gold standard statistics were done on cadavers. Cadavers, dead bodies, dead freaking bodies. And I remember sitting there being like, this is insane. Because a dead body and an alive body are very different things. And how it fit until the gold standard, because that was the best available research at the time to measure. Doesn't mean it was good. It means it was the best available. And why this was done with a dead body is because you can implant something in the tissue to see at what level of force a body can handle it until it would sever the vertebral artery. So the biggest pushback to chiropractic care, if you don't know, is that people argue you can sever an artery in your neck, the vertebral artery, which can cause a blood clot, stroke, or straight up kill you. So the whole course was around: hey, we've done all of these tests on cadavers. We've measured the force it would take to sever the vertebral artery, and I'm pretty sure they said it never severed it. So we've gotten rid of that red flag that no matter how much force you put into this cadaver, you're not gonna sever the vertebral artery. And honestly, when you read reports or like you see these news stories and stuff, it isn't necessarily that they've severed the vertebral artery. There's so many other factors there. But the point, and again, not knocking Cairo, but the point of this whole course was that they were proving that you're not gonna do that on a dead body. So my issue isn't chiropractic care. It's about how institutions are teaching based on the data available to them and what we consider reputable data. Like I cannot be the only person who thinks that that was absolutely insane. I actually went with my girlfriend who's in osteo, and you have to remember, we've done four and a half years of osteo school together, so she can read me like a book. She's like, I couldn't even look at you when these lectures were happening because of what your face was doing, and I was afraid that you were just gonna lose your mind. And honestly, I thought I pissed the instructor off at the beginning because I had a lot of questions and was like, this doesn't fly with how my brain works. Um, and to his credit, he actually was very lovely answering questions, and he's like, I really look that you um, you know, challenge the status quo when you're asking questions and you're not just um like mindlessly following along. So it it all ended good. Um but what this whole experience showed me is that we are prioritizing what is easy to measure over what actually matters in healing. Safety is measurable, it's trackable, it fits into a study. Although, really, in this instance, I fully do not believe you compare a dead body to an alive body, especially when we factor in the nervous system. But again, that's a whole episode for another day. I left the experience with more questions than answers. Does this actually reduce pain? Does this change how someone feels in their body? Does this improve their quality of life? That's way more subjective, but it gets pushed aside. And it was crazy because it was such a stark contrast to how I was taught osteopathy. When I was in osteopathy school, our principal said something that I will never forget. And he said, there's very little data on osteopathy because it's almost impossible to quantify. Because you can't isolate variables cleanly. You're working with the body, the nervous system, the person's lifestyle, their stress, their beliefs. So subjectivity is your data. And he he was like, anybody who is in osteopathy is here to help people. Osteopathy is not mainstream. You get into it because you see the bigger picture and you've it's probably touched you in some way that you've become very passionate about it. And you're not gonna dedicate your life's work to figuring out how to quantify the practice. You get in, you do your schooling, you want to get your hands on bodies, you want to help people. He literally begs anyone to get into research because our current standard of practice, like, it's the research is lacking based on how science wants to make data from osteopathy. So I guess this is what I want you to take away from this episode. Subjectivity is not a flaw. It is information. Your pain is information, your intuition is information, your emotional response is information. We've kind of been taught to distrust it because it doesn't show up on a scan or a chart. So instead of only looking at one type of evidence, I want you to think about three. One, scientific evidence, studies. Yes, we do love them, but two, clinical evidence. What do practitioners consistently see? And then three, your lived experience, what you feel. That is important. If you're ever with a practitioner who like doesn't want to hear your subjective complaints, like run away. Because right now, our system really only respects the first scientific evidence. But healing happens in all three of those layers. So when we say there's no data who to support it, we should really be saying we don't fully understand how to measure it yet, but we don't discredit it because those are two very different phrases. One dismisses your experience, and the other leaves room for curiosity and adds some validation to your lived experience. So, my summit takeaway after rambling at you guys, I feel like this one I got a little jazzed up too. Sorry guys. You are not a statistic. Your experience is data, even if it doesn't fit into a study. That's all I got today. If this episode made you think about your own healing differently or helped you trust your body just a little bit more, please send it to someone who needs to hear it. And as always, we can continue the conversation on Instagram at Alana Crawford underscore. I hope you have a wonderful day, and I will see you next Wednesday. Much love, guys.