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Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.

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Jeannie Di Bon is a "Movement Therapist" who "specialis[es] in Hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Chronic Pain." In the introduction, she talks about her own experiences in a way I find very sympathetic:

I've lost count of the number of times a doctor has told me it's all down to IBS and instructed me to eat more fibre and try Pilates or yoga to relax. Dismissive in its nature and kind of ironic now, as I trained to become a Pilates teacher in 2008.

And, you know, the actual core (yes I did that) of her Integrated Movement Method is sound: she's giving advice about fostering body awareness, of when and where you're tense and when you're not, working through a pretty standard sequence of breathing exercises and gentle movements. All the exercises in this book are the kind of thing that show up pretty early on in any full-body physiotherapy programme, that have loads of progressions available (particularly within the Pilates model), and they're absolutely fine and probably useful to folk who've not been able to access care covering this kind of topic.

If it were just the exercise programme, it would be ... fine. More or less. I think a bunch of the ways she explains movements are unclear and counterintuitive, but hey, presumably they work for at least some people.

Unfortunately, there are all of the bits in between.

Chapter 4 is where they went from "okay, you're simplifying to the point of lies-to-children but you are also explaining why" to "... either you're deliberately misrepresenting things for personal gain or you're wildly incompetent", and I'm still not sure which of those it actually is. (I am trying not to think too hard about the possibility that the answer is "both".)

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tl;dr there is nothing you will get from the Integral Movement Method that you won't get from competently-taught or -explained Pilates except scaremongering and misdirection... and unlike IMM, you can get decent Pilates resources for free. Don't bother with this one.

I am now well over halfway through the book, and spent most of chapter four screeching to anyone who would listen about the extent to which either she is deliberately and cynically misrepresenting approaches that aren't Her Personal Programme in the interests of selling the latter, or she's just incompetent.

The actual suggested movements -- the strength-building and the stretching -- are totally reasonable, and also totally standard. It's the surrounding framing that has my eyebrows crawling into my hairline; I... tried to summarise and rapidly discovered I was launching into the full rant, and it's past bedtime, so let's start with: while there's a References section it's a whole 15 items long, and she's blithely saying "X states" or "Y says" as though the fact that something has been published in a single peer-reviewed paper means that it's unquestionably true, and of those fifteen one is a systematic review of any kind and... Several... are under the aegis of an organisation specialising in complementary medicine.

More details tomorrow, probably. With excerpts.