That reporter is a bit of a woo woo.
Pert is a talented scientist who went woo woo many years ago for reasons I don’t have time to go into here.http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/04/what_the_bleep_.html.
He made a living out of woo woo beliefs.
Social work has gotten distinctly woo-woo lately. There's a lot of endorsement of quackery. I think that might be because the social work profession has attracted a lot of people who don't want to do science, or maybe because there is a big market for woo-woo stuff.