Talk:Body & Brain

Untitled
Is it even Yoga? I attended a class several years ago in Boulder, Colorado, and was not able to discern any "yoga" in their teachings at all. Calling what they do "yoga" gives it an air of respectability and a presumed connection to ancient Hindu philosophy. I suppose the word "yoga" is not copyrighted, and anyone can call what they do yoga... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.211.237.88 (talk) 13:20, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Headline text
CULT

Here's a web page that collects various articles on the cult aspects of Dahn Yoga: http://www.rickross.com/groups/dti.html

They seem to rely on tactics similar to Scientology, convincing people that they have "blockages" within their body that need to be healed through Dahn Yoga. Naturally, this will cost several thousand dollars. I'm not sure what the proper Wiki way would be to have NPOV between Dahn Yoga as a cult and Dahn Yoga as it is presented in the advertising blurb here.

Wiki needs to get its stuff together. This people are genuine criminals and this info relays none of that to the unsuspecting public. Get a real page wikipedia! Don't coddle a genuine cult!

Dahn is some strange combo of exercises sold as yoga. It's a weird group of fanatics who are taought to fear the future. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.88.57.70 (talk) 16:07, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia policy
According to Jimbo Wales:

"No original research is a fundamental bedrock policy on Wikipedia. This means: unless you can confirm a controversial fact with a cite to an independent mainstream publication, you must leave it out of the article."

--Fire Star 火星 18:49, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Sectioning and NPOV
It seems that according to the majority of reliable sources the organization is most notable for being accused of cult status, rather than as a simple instructional group. I think the separate controversy section (which is discouraged by WP:NPOV anyway) should be removed, and the info integrated with the intro and history sections. As the majority of sources only deal with the accusations of cult-hood, this should be part of the basic introduction to the topic. Van Tucky  Talk 19:44, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

I have completed a basic restructuring. Van Tucky  Talk 20:30, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks like that restructuring has long since been undone to bury all references to the controversy. Even the lead-in to the "news" section has been replaced with some cheerful "we're great!" article instead of the more prevalent and notable news articles about the controversy.  Are cult members the only ones working on this article now? -24.90.210.165 (talk) 20:35, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Use of Letters to the Editor (LTE) as Source Material
I'm not clear about accepted community policy concerning use of LTE as source material for articles. VanTucky, I agree that letters are not as reliable as published articles in the same publications, due to minimal editorial oversight. What is not clear to me, even after reading WP:RS and WP:V again, is whether they are accepted as sources in limited contexts, as in this article. From what I've read, there is no prohibition against them. Please point me to specific guidelines or directions, so I can fully understand your objections. If the letter were used as source for something presented as fact, I would agree with you. However, it seems reasonable to use a published letter from the spokesperson as a source describing the spokesperson's stated position, especially since the letter is a reply to a previously accepted source used in the same paragraph. Can you clarify either the accepted Wiki guidelines or your personal opinion in this specific case? Thank you! Forestgarden 00:40, 16 September 2007 (UTC)


 * A literal prohibition is not required. A letter to the editor that lacks fact checking and editorial review is defined as a questionable source. The point is not that letters wouldn't be okay for citing opinion, but that the source does not reliably verify that the source of the letter was a sanctioned spokesperson for Dahn. Applying an official air to a source which is not confirmed to be so is not acceptable. The other source comes from the Village Voice, which is reliably assumed to have confirmed that it was a Dahn spokesperson. Van Tucky  Talk 01:01, 16 September 2007 (UTC)


 * If you read the letter in question, the Village Voice replied to the letter, thus showing that they accepted the letter-writer as the actual spokesperson, and not someone pretending to be a spokesperson as you seem to be implying. I would think this provides confirmation enough for the letter to be used as reference in this paragraph. Do you disagree? You seem to be splitting hairs about validity in this case. Forestgarden 01:27, 16

September 2007 (UTC)


 * The letter to the editor was printed in the Village Voice, a publication with an editorial board. While letters are not edited and fact-checked in the same fashion as an article, editors do choose the published ones carefully from the many that may have been submitted.  Villiage Voice was clearly convinced that this letter was from Charlotte Connors, the person identified in both articles as the Dahn Center spokesperson, or it would not have been published with that attribution. Rhetorician magician 01:51, 16 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Even if the letter was considered an RS, which it isn't, the letter only ever criticizes the article and the journalism of the Village Voice. It doesn't call the accusations of culthood anything, but only denies certain points in the wrongful death case (i.e. the drugging) and attacks the journalistic standards of the Voice. It doesn't even deal with an accusation of culthood as the article's text claims. Including this is not just proving that it meets WP:RS, but that the reliable source supports the content you wish included. According to WP:V, the burden of proof rests with you to prove that the content is fit for inclusion. Van Tucky  Talk 04:31, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
 * As far as I am concerned, the legitamacy of the letter is prooven by the very policy pages that you have cited in your attempts to discredit it. It was published in a legitamate publication, and it is obviously a reliable representation of the spokeperson's responce to  the article in question.  To suggest that it may have been falsefied is simply irrational.  However, your point about immediate relevancy is more well-reasoned.  I will revise the sentence to deal only with the cult issue.  For the sake of balance, the sentence must include some specifics about the spokesperson's POV (i.e. that the cult accusations are based on misinterpretation), just as the previous sentence includes specifics about the critic's POV (i.e. that Dahn Yoga is a cult). Rhetorician magician 04:34, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
 * You fail to understand my objections in terms of relevance. It was not that your addition was irrelevant (far from it), but that the source was so. The source doesn't ever mention the accused cult status of Dahn, so it cannot be used as a source retorting that claim. If you wanted to use it in a relevant way, such as a source proving that Dahn spokespeople objected to the veracity and fairness of news coverage, then that would be acceptable. Van Tucky  Talk 22:49, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Appropriateness of Photograph
Van Tucky, I was wondering if you could leave a comment about the photo, given your depth of experience as a Wikipedian. I have two questions about the photograph of the Korean ad. First, there is no discussion of Dahn Yoga ad campaigns, so it seems like an odd choice and it doesn't seem to add anything of substance to the entry. The entry seems to be about Dahn yoga as it exists in the United States, with no mention of its current status in Korea. Would it be better to replace the photo with something that is more descriptive of the practice itself, if a non-copyrighted choice can be found? Secondly, this is English Wikipedia, not Korean Wikipedia. I have read that foreign language sources should be avoided if English language equivalents exist. Does the same sort of thing apply to photographs? Also, I think you added it so maybe you can explain your rationale.Nicola Cola 05:31, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the specificity of your questions. First, the image is still relevant even if the article doesn't yet discuss Dahn ad campaigns. The fact that we can have an image illustrating that Dahn does have advertising campaigns and is active in Korea is extremely informative. As to what the article "seems to be about", Wikipedia has a worldwide focus. If we can find reliable sources detailing facts about Dahn in Korea and elsewhere, it would be most welcome. Being too U.S.-centric is a problem to be fixed, not something that we should alter the images to fit with. Foreign languages in images are perfectly fine, as their text does not necessarily have to impart encyclopedic information. The relevance is that it is a Dahn poster, not that it is an English-language poster. An image of someone practicing Dahn yoga would be great. However, it is important to remember that this article is also about the organizations and individuals that created and promote the practice (not just Dahn yoga itself), so a photo of Dahn yoga being practiced isn't automatically better. But if you can find a freely licensed image of better quality that the present one, it would be helpful. Van Tucky  Talk 05:58, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Reference Specificity
VanTucky, please point me to the specific statement in the reference you mentioned in your removal of my request for citation. The reason I noted the lack of citation is that none of the articles referenced in that paragraph have any direct claim regarding the efficacy of the practice. There are many other criticisms but I cannot find any regarding this specific claim. Thanks. Forestgarden 05:49, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

recent additions
For NPOV and accuracy, I removed the claim of 1 million practitioners. First off, the policy page of NPOV as well as WP:WTA advises against following facts with immediate refutations that begin with phrases like "despite this" or "however". Second, there was no reliable, independent citation for such a number. Third, and most importantly, citing the number of practitioners is not a comment that refutes any claim about the characteristic of Dahn training. Van Tucky  Talk 19:50, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Timelyheart's additions to the Ilchi Lee article
They smell fishy. Are they forgeries? How come no one ever heard of these religious scholars before? They weren't on the Dahn page in the past, where did Timelyheart dig them up?

Matthew Laffert (talk) 10:39, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Article needs improvement
In my opinion, this article is a terrible read and it needs lots of work. I will now proceed to make changes for a better, more suitable article.Matthew Laffert (talk) 13:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Matthew, please read the note I just left for you at . As I said there, your contributions to Wikipedia are welcomed, but they must respect the rules of the venue. (The majority of your edits so far do not.) You must accept that all reliably sourced material is allowed in Wikipedia articles, not just the information that you personally agree with. In fact the point is to provide encyclopedic articles, rather than opinion pieces that are biased either positively or negatively about the subject. This means that your personal beliefs, or the expected need of a for-profit company to keep itself in business, are not terribly relevant to what should be in the article. What's relevant is what material has been covered in reliable sources and then presenting that material in a balanced and neutral way. Since this article seems to attract people with strong opinions about the subject, this is even more important. Go ahead and edit, of course, but please make reasonable edits so we don't have to revert your work (saves time for everyone involved, including you)... Forestgarden (talk) 19:31, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Contribution deleted as "bogus"
RE: March 4, 2008 removal by NicolaCola of some my contribution with comment: "Removed non-NPOV material. EVERY study is limited and academic articles always make suggestion for further study. Bogus attempt to cast doubt on positive results of the study.)"

I believe that personal attacks and presumption of mal intent are frowned upon by Wiki policy. (FYI, one of the limitiations discussed by the authors would have resulted in more positive results, not negative.)

Just as it is commendable, balancing, and neutral for study authors to discuss potential for intervening bias and other study limitations and offer suggestions, it should be so for a Wikipedia article too. It's non-NPOV to imply that a study showed causality and benefits without balancing it with the study's limitations. With this study, I can see potential for bias in that at least one of the researchers was a Dahn practitioner, now high ranking in the organization. The subjects weren't "blinded" to the instructors - Dahn instructors could have influenced subjects' self-image before taking both the pre and post tests. The subjects were not representational of the general adult population, mostly middle age educated women, making it questionable to generalize the results to all adults. They didn't compare the effects to other mind-body practices or other programs or treatments, limiting the specific conclusions you can make about Dahn yoga. In fact, they found the benefits of the Dahn training were not dose-dependent, meaning that those who took zero to few Dahn classes improved as much as those who took 100 classes. And as the study authors said, the results shouldn't be extended to a patient population without randomization.

Any studies mentioned on Wikipedia in support of a practice, especially a practice that sometimes makes extraordinary claims about cures and supernatural abilities, and is sometimes controversial, should be scrutinized and balanced or left out.--Timelyheart (talk) 21:44, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

BUT its not the cult and bogus... Its a helpful one for the every man. —Preceding unsigned comment added by I NO ENGLSIH, MY DAUGTHER ENGLISHI (talk • contribs) 21:47, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

removed text from 58.140.133.35
'Dahn's leader is a documented sexual predator who preys on brainwashed victims. Mr. Lee is a very humble, Ph.d educated, poverty level, abstinent, handsome, multilingual, and thin individual. He is a greater man than Jesus or Davinci.'

Please provide a reference, unreferenced material may be challenged or removed. petiatil &raquo;speak 06:57, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Whitewashing of article
Requesting comment on handling of controversy related to Dahn yoga. 15:01, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I visited the Dahn Yoga page to learn about the well-known controversies, but the article appears to have been thoroughly whitewashed by its members. All revisions since December, and many before then, seem to have been entered with the intent to bury any reference to controversy, either by creating a dismissive introduction, deleting reference entirely, and burying them behind a bunch of specifically positive but questionably relevant articles. I don't know enough about Dahn nor about Wikipedia policies to tackle this. -Lciaccio (talk) 20:53, 1 June 2012 (UTC) Moved the above from WP:RFC/BOARD Coastside (talk) 15:01, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree. The article has some major problems, both in terms of bias and organizationally.  I took some first steps in working it over, removing some promotional text and making a few other minor fixes. —Torchiest talkedits 17:22, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree also. They have some major problems with POV.JSR (talk) 23:35, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Comment. I can't make any sense of this, perhaps because I have never heard of Dahn Yoga. For a start, what on earth does it have to do with maths, science or technology? More specifically in terms of the RFC, what exactly was/is the "controversy"? What is the article doing in WP in its current form anyway? It is bog-standard, unoriginal, new-age smoke-blowing and handwaving -- totally meaningless. And the wording is an insult to any reader's intelligence, if any: "...a form of internal alchemy using five simple postures focused on breathing and what is said to be proper positioning of the body. It is claimed to help release stagnant energy and accumulate fresh energy in the lower abdomen, ..." FTLOM! And people are discussing whether it is POV??? Since when do quackery spams and scams have to be NPOV? I have no idea how the controversy should be handled, if at all. The article (the only thing I have read on the subject), reads to me as though a lot of suckers got rooked and then suckered each other into court and got out of their depth in the legal system, but in the article I don't see much substance on the point. Is the matter really interesting enough to be encyclopedic? There are thousands of similar double-talk quackeries out there and this one is just a rubber-stamp of the type. For my part the whole article could be junked, unless someone sees fit to make a sufficiently valuable case study as a warning to readers wondering whether to go Dahn or go to a plain vanilla gym. JonRichfield (talk) 06:54, 21 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Comment. I don't have an informed opinion about how this article should be handled, but I recommend that it be removed from the Math, Science, and Technology list. &mdash; ChalkboardCowboy[T] 13:27, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

I have done a little bit more work today. I think the article is decently balanced at this point. If no one has any objections in the next week or so, I'll probably remove the POV tag. —Torchiest talkedits 15:31, 18 July 2012 (UTC)


 * I've removed the POV tag, since there have been no objections. —Torchiest talkedits 14:47, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm not familiar enough with NPOV standards to know which changes are appropriate, so feedback would be great. However, as an attorney I am happy to help anyone parse out which procedural matters are key, which are official, etc.-Lciaccio (talk) 02:58, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
 * It looks like someone has undone the work that was done to fix the article. I went back and found some of the content to restore it manually, but something more might need to be done to prevent the group or its fans from deleting the critical portions of the article.  Also, were the other portions always so long?  There seems to be an unnecessary amount of information about the group's practices, philosophies, and studies, when a simple summary will do.  I will continue to restore old content and organize the controversy section, but I would appreciate a second opinion on preventing sabotage and trimming the remainder.  -Lciaccio (talk) 01:43, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Brain Wave Vibration.
Hey Wiki-ers. Reading the line "published in the US National Library of Medicine" in the Brain Wave Vibration section triggered a slew of red flags for me, so I dug up the original articles. I corrected the citations, replacing the aggregators with the original journal titles, authors and DOIs.

At the same time, I decided to clarify what the articles actually said, as I don't think whoever input it originally totally got what was going on there.

Then I decided to move the CNN-investigative stuff together into the first paragraph, since Gupta's comments didn't have anything to do with what was examined in the journal articles.

When I was there I figured I should remove the quote from the youtube video since it was pretty much was a restatement of the official line with some additional unsubstantiatable claims.

This whole article needs to be re-examined. There's still a lot of reads-like-an-advertisement stuff in here.

Reve (talk) 01:39, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I like the changes you made, and encourage you to continue in that vein. The article was pretty awful a year or two ago, and I fixed it up some, but there's plenty of room for improvement yet. —Torchiest talkedits 03:36, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * A lot of the advertisement info was still there, albeit with a counterpoint sentence after each lengthy description of a training method or study. I trimmed some of the information that was based solely on their own research, i.e. studies conducted by the group itself. -Lciaccio (talk) 02:34, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Body & Brain
Dahn Yoga recently renamed themselves to Body & Brain. I would like to change the name of the page to Brain and Body and make the according changes to the article; If there are no objections I will do so in 3 days. Cran32 (talk) 02:17, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Any and all opposition to this should be voiced here within the next two days. Cran32 (talk) 23:55, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

FINAL: I will move this article to Body & Brain in 24 hours if no opposition is voiced.Cran32 (talk) 01:16, 1 April 2017 (UTC)