When I mentioned to a couple of friends that I was reviewing a book about teletherapy, their reaction was the same: “Ah, telepathy... When will they stop writing about this paranormal nonsense?”
My learned friends could not be blamed for confusing ‘telepathy’ - communication from one mind to another by extrasensory means (according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary) with ‘teletherapy’ – a social and scientific phenomenon, the coherent definition of which is hard to come by. It remains conspicuous by its absence in the seemingly omniscient Wikipedia, which refers instead to ‘telehealth’, defined rather clumsily as “the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies.”
The latter definition, to my mind, ignores one key element of ‘teletherapy’ – an approach to medical treatment, which – from time immemorial – has used mail, radio, printed word (books and articles) and other technologies...