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The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar yesterday, a culture war-y case about Colorado’s law banning talk therapists from discussing “conversion therapy” with minor clients.
The oral argument ended up hinging on a different culture war question: is strictly talk therapy – without prescriptions, shocks, clinical analysis, official diagnosing, whatever – inherently medical? I.e., is addressing “mental health” through conversation really “health” at all, or is it something far simpler?
Colorado admitted a priest or a life coach could have the very conversations that it was banning therapists from partaking in; why would the difference in title suddenly change the classification of the act itself?
Some arguments tried to say that talk therapy is medical conduct because it triggers a physiological reaction in the brain, but all speech has the capacity to do that – someone telling you they love you can release dopamine and oxytocin; someone telling you “gross, no” after you ask them on a date can create a crushing response; etc. And yet, speech in a general sense continues to receive protections that conduct does not.
Does “medicine” need to be something that physically manipulates and alters the body? Does medicine need to be something directed towards solving an illness?
I can see the argument that mental health as addressed through a clinical diagnosis and prescriptions is medicine. But I am struggling to understanding talk therapy as falling into the medical category, in part because much of talk therapy isn’t related to the prevention, treatment, or cure of mental illness – a lot of talk therapy is simply asking for help with a difficult relationship, achieving a deeper understanding of self, or venting to someone who is trained to recognize self-perception road blocks.
Taking the view that medicine is about preventing/treating illness, it would be especially odd to view conversion therapy conversations as medical – after all, society has moved past viewing same-sex attraction as a disease, supposedly. So why then would conversations about attraction be medical in nature in this context? Is it from a larger need for therapy to be considered health more broadly?
"Is talk therapy medicine?" seems like a very easy question to answer.
Is it licensed and regulated by a state or federal level medical board? If yes then it's medicine, if not then it's just speech.
That is question begging of the real sort. A state medical board could say it has authority to regulate radio programs, and under your definition, that would make radio broadcasts medical treatments.
The board could say whatever it wanted, but it can only regulate the things that the State delegates to them. For example this Act (pdf) does not give them any power to regulate radio broadcasts. Heck, they can't even set their own fees: It's fixed at $100 in section 36, and would require legislation to change.
And if the state delegates the power to a medical board because they think the 1st Amendment is icky then???
I wouldn't call it a pure medical board anymore, regardless of what its name is. If you know of any medical and telecommunication boards, let me know, and I'll say everything they do is either medicine or telecommunications. Otherwise I'll chalk it up as an absurd hypothetical.
Its not absurd. This profession is people talking in a room. The state, under the guise of medicine, is regulating the content of those words.
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