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Book Review: Social Work Education and Practice Engagement, edited by Sanjai Bhatt and Suresh Pathare

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Guidepoints News from NADA Jan/Feb 2015
 Vatsyayan writes, “Utilizing theories of human behavior and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work. Acupuncture and all Qi-flow therapies ‘help the body help itself.’ And this is also the goal of social work.”

Book Review: Social Work Education and Practice Engagement, edited by Sanjai Bhatt and Suresh Pathare

Social worker and Nada India Foundation (NIF) chairperson, Suneel Vatsyayan, is a contributing author to a new volume on social work in India which has just been published by Shipra Publications. Vatsyayan’s chapter in this anthology considers the connection between social work and the NADA ear acupuncture treatment. Specifically, he describes how the NADA protocol s as an ideal social work intervention for drug and alcohol addiction.

Vatsyayan trained first at the Navjyoti Delhi Police Foundation Drug Treatment Centre in 2000 with NADA founder, Michael Smith, and social worker and past NADA president, Ruth Ackerman. He then continued his training at Lincoln RecoveryCenter in 2001. At the Navjyoti treatment center, he observed that the NADA protocol can help to build a healthy rapport and trust with clients.

Vatsyayan writes, “Utilizing theories of human behavior and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work. Acupuncture and all Qi-flow therapies ‘help the body help itself.’ And this is also the goal of social work.”

In January 2015, Michael Smith spent a month and a half in India, visiting programs and training facilities coordinated by NIF. While there, he wrote the following review of the book:

As a young psychiatrist in training, I made my first contact with professional social workers. I had questions about many things, but the psychiatrists were focused on teaching me certain techniques and a limited method of inquiry, much as you would train secondary personnel. The message was to follow certain pathways and avoid other viewpoints. Only the social worker on the training team respected my questions – and answered them by providing information and extending my horizons.

In the new volume, Social Work Education and Practice Engagement, edited by Sanjai Bhatt and Suresh Pathare,
this admirable trend is extended to India. In the opening chapter, Prof. Husain Siddiqui makes a comparison between social work and the traditional professions of
law and medicine. Both restrict skills and applicability to certain intellectually defined situations. My mother is a law school teacher, so I was familiar with the technicalities of the law and its separation from social common sense problems.I chose to enter medicine because I thought it didn’t have those limitations. I subsequently learned that medicine, at least the allopathic high-budget variety, has crucial blind spots. These include a lack of appreciation of remedies not made by pharmaceutical processing, and any self healing and homeostatic remedial effect. Such balancing, corrective effects are labeled “spontaneous” – with the implication of random cosmic rays. Only technical medicine can be smart and have a “plan.”

As this book amply demonstrates, the profession of social work deeply values life and the variety of natural circumstances. It is inclusive. It does not derive power by excluding layers of living realities. It also includes a female component which values all circumstances that humans have given birth to, not just a few situations that certain men have chosen to pay attention to. Other professions often exclude vital aspects of life. Social work includes the richness of human life.

Source : Guidepoints News from NADA Jan/Feb 2015

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