This article has been published in the Knowlatige Blog, the 18th of April 2019.
Ludovico started his career as an orthopedic surgeon, however, he always knew that the solution for many of his patients lay in complementary therapies. Inspired by Chinese Traditional Medicine, the study of energy lines, the use of acupuncture and neural therapy, Ludovico embarked on a whole new adventure that lead him and his patients away from the surgical theatre.
What took you down the orthopedic surgeon route?
Actually, after studying science and entering medical school, I underwent conditioning! So I felt the pressure to specialize and saw that surgery was and is a far more precise practice than other medical specialties, where we have a lot of possible underlying causes that we eventually identify. A joint needs replacing – you remove the joint and replace it!
How did you then discover kinesiology? Were you skeptical at first?
My father was in chronic pain with his spine – he had three herniated discs and already 2 interventions, and there seemed to be no solutions. After visiting many different specialists, he went to a physician who used kinesiology. I was 16 years old, and when my father came home telling us about these crazy tests that he had undergone, and that he had to change his diet, we all thought this was crazy! However, a few weeks later my dad was getting better…so I wanted to go to the follow-up appointment and see what these tests were all about.
Just a year later, I myself had a collision with a lorry whilst on my bicycle, and fractured a vertebra…I was left with very limited movement in my neck after the treatment. So I visited the same doctor, who within one consultation performed one technique that released my neck, and I regained movement.
I knew that surgery and medicine were limited in the results that I could give my patients in many cases. So I studied acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine for four years, specialized kinesiology and neural therapy. I immediately introduced this into my work with patients in the hospital. However, despite my many efforts, I did not manage to integrate my additional knowledge into the system.
Why do you think that you were unable to convince your colleagues to apply kinesiological techniques?
Fear – when you realize that you have studied many years, yet there is a whole world of complementary medicine that you have not studied or that you still do not understand, it makes you think that you need to reconsider your career.
What convinces you that kinesiology works?
Seeing the results in my own personal experience, and seeing the results in the vast majority of my patients in my practice.
What are the challenges ahead in the field of kinesiology and for kinesiologists?
I really think that we need to find and build our own identity. The general population does not really know what kinesiology is. It is confused with other techniques or professions – and the term itself is misused. Even amongst us, we find it difficult to agree on the nomenclature.
Kinesiology is within a scientific environment that questions everything. We need to demonstrate that the kinesiological methods are safe, effective and efficient, by using our own methodology. We cannot use R&D methods used for drug development – as, with many complementary therapies, our treatments are patient-specific, making scientific research and investigation more complex.
We are often made to feel that we are limited in our understanding, but in fact, I think it is the other way round. In Chinese medicine, intuition has been listened too, and only now we in the West are starting to see the links.
Can you give me an example?
Many! In Chinese medicine, the immune system is related to the first airway, and large intestine. For thousands of years, they have known about the relationship between the gut and emotions. This was ridiculed, until recent years where science is slowly demonstrating that indeed the gut is the ´second brain´, and gut health is vital for the immune system and good health.
How do you see that the Knowlative website and community can address these challenges?
The first section we built in Knowlative was the Vocabulary: we must start using the same terms to describe what we do. It is the first step towards collaboration and it leads to growth and to a recognizable image within the general public.
Another big step we have already taken is to make Knowlative collaborative. Any Pro subscriber can publish new content. Anyone who has the right intuitions and experiences worth sharing. If we start talking freely among peers of our problems, experiences, needs, and solutions we can grow very fast both as professionals and as a community.
And there are many more features already planned that need to be realized.
What is your vision for Knowlative in the next five years?
We are already working to put videos and pdf documents in our Knowledge section and to let Authors and Schools create private insights to the open knowledge so as to share with their students or to distribute in the platform as a pro content.
Another big step will be the “Work” section where we will be able to store our client’s data in a secure way. This will be the basic tool for collecting private and community statistics.
With statistics we will be able to make retrospective studies on the population of our clients to see where there is a significative association between the techniques we use and the client’s outcome.
I hope that in 5 years from now, we will have the first published clinical scientific evidence from Muscle Response Testing.
Why do you think it is important that kinesiologists join the platform? And what role will they have in the development of Knowlative?
Obviously, without users, a sharing community cannot work properly. If anyone likes the vision we have and what we are doing, I hope they join in and start collaborating. But there is much more than that. We already know the big picture where we want to go but there are so many different possibilities of development. What is the feature we need next? Which information do we need during our work session? There are so many modalities in kinesiology and in complementary medicine and we cannot possibly know all the protocols. With the aid of the community, we will shape the perfect tool for the work of all of us.
I started this project to build the tool that I would like to have in my practice and in my study, but Knowlative has to be useful beyond the users, we want to change the perception the World has of Muscle Response Testing… and this is a task we have to do all together.
The World needs more kinesiologists and, in order to help people, they must have the best possible tool.
