Research diary part 1

Research diary skrivs på engelska då allt material i uppsatsarbetet skall vara på just engelska.

The last part of the course at SCOM includes a smaller research project and we have been encouraged to keep a research diary. It feels like a good idea to post it here, hopefully these lines can be useful for someone else in this situation further on.

My academical background is non-existant. I have no experience on reading academical texts and definitly no experience on writing them. I have never studied at a university and have never written for anyone else to read, let alone assess and review.

Lucky for me I live together with someone who has. My fiancée has written lots of essays, pretty darn good ones even, and knows her academic discourse inside and out. Hopefully, if I behave, she will help me out when I get stuck.

We have of course had several lectures on the subject of writing an essay, seems like fun once you get it down. I haven´t got it down yet. But I do have an idea of what to write about. A pretty darn good idea, if I may say so myself.

A while back I was browsing the internet and stumbled upon the Swedish National Encyclopedia. I can´t remember why I looked that page up but for some reason I took a peek at how they had defined Osteopathy.

You can read the short version here

What disturbed me was how they categorized Osteopathy as an alternative medicine with no scientifically proven results of treatment. This is of course incorrect, there are lots of published articles on the effects of Osteopathic treatment, but it made me think how the established institutions in Sweden perceive Osteopathy.

This made me think of a recent document where Osteopathy was degraded. Actually the correct term I think is trashed.

The college of Osteopathic medicine in Gothenburg, SKOS, had applied to be validated by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education as an institution of higher education. The school was assessed by a committee but was denied on a whole list of reasons.

Nothing strange with this of course but the document ended in a way that raised many eyebrows. The committee described Osteopathy in a very strange and in many ways faulty manner.

So my idea is to take a deeper look into this document and hopefully find out what is really being said about Osteopathy by the committee and also find out what is being left out or said between the lines.

This could be interesting.