As for being a waste of time, I was speaking from the point of view of a Healer, rather than a patient.
So. From that perspective, the tenets of Soul Healing are a lot less... credible than for physical healing.
If one in ten patients with a physical malady lie about what is wrong with them, or mislead the Healer -- whether deliberately or not -- you can be sure that nine out of ten patients with a soul fracture or some other intangible malady will lie to you. And that's out of the patients who are actually lucid and capable of answering your questions.
Unlike physical healing, it is... *hesitates at using the word "impossible", since Dearborn had insisted that Healers who thought in terms of "possible" and "impossible" were doomed to failure* ...very difficult to obtain independent verification on a consistent basis, since the maladies by their very nature cause one or more of a patient's aura, soul or mental faculties to become... unstable. *smiles slightly at this, hearing Dearborn's voice telling him that the only stable patient is a dead patient -- and even that only lasts until the rot sets in*
*sighs* Soul Healing is to Healing what Divination is to Arithmancy.# It's imprecise. Treatments succeed or fail not just on their own merits, but based on a range of other factors that can never be entirely accounted, let alone controlled, for. Outside of a simple, binary diagnosis [ie; "sick" and "not sick"], maladies cannot be externally or independently verified.
But as I said, that's from the point of view of a Healer. I've no doubt that someone who might benefit from treatment would hold an alternative view.
#Sirius is really a number-cruncher at heart, and "soul healing" = "flaky".
His main objection to the discipline is that it does nothing but create false hope, but he's not going to say that out loud to Sevvie :)