Finding imaginative gifts that express sincere caring for friends and loved ones is always challenging. The gift of touch, offered through massage therapy, can be an unexpected surprise that is affordable and appropriate for so many occasions and types of people.
Diagnosed with breast cancer, Mary Ellen Havard of St. Louis, Mo., was facing the known (a regimen of necessary, but painful and debilitating medical treatment), and the unknown (the outcome). “The doctors told me when they outlined my treatment that it was going to be rigorous,” she says. “I knew I needed to do something to help myself feel better as much as I could while I was having chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.
Movement in massage sessions brings life to your clients and life to your practice. I have learned this from my own healing and from 32 years of practice.
I was born with congenital cataracts, and after undergoing several unsuccessful surgeries that left my lenses brutally scarred, I was declared permanently blind as a child. I functioned through Braille, and everyone believed this was how I would spend the rest of my life. But I yearned to see.
“You need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day.” This old standard has been preached by almost everyone — doctors, dietitians, athletic trainers, health columnists, and massage therapists, to name a few. Most likely, you have offered this same advice or something similar. This largely unchallenged message can be found repeatedly in all types of media, including massage literature.
After months of hot flashes, fatigue, and irritability, oftentimes the last thing a woman in the throes of menopause wants is to be touched. Yet, this is exactly when a woman needs to experience touch, especially massage and bodywork. When she most needs to be nurtured, comforted, and reminded of her beauty and inner spirit, is often when a woman’s body rebels and begins fighting against her.
Once associated primarily with Indian gurus and counterculture enthusiasts, yoga has grown in popularity and is embraced by Americans from all walks of life. In a recent issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (March/April 2004), researchers from Harvard Medical School reported statistics gleaned from David Eisenberg’s well-known 1998 survey on the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the United States.
Dieting and exercising to lose weight are as American as apple pie (low-fat, that is). And now with the extreme makeover craze sweeping the country, liposuction — the surgical removal of fat tissue — may eventually become just as common. But taking this shortcut also bypasses the health benefits associated with slimming down, including reduced risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and fatigue.
Your antibacterial soap does not provide better protection against infectious disease than conventional products — and it could breed a bug that will make you really sick. That’s what researchers at Columbia University determined when they randomly assigned 238 households to use either antibacterial or regular soap products for a year. During that time, both groups experienced the same number of infectious symptoms. Researchers were not surprised, as most infections are viral rather than bacterial.
Yoga reduces fatigue in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition affecting one in 1,000, according to a recent study published in Neurology. Experts have long known that regular exercise eases weariness associated with MS, but this was the first controlled study measuring the effects of yoga, which proved to have the same results.
“I’ve always had two or more tracks running in my head. The pleasurable one was thinking forward to some future scene. Imagining what should be, planning on the edge of fantasy. The other played underneath with all too realistic fragments of what I should have done. There it was in perfect microcosm, the past and the future coming together to squeeze out the present — which is the only time in which we can be fully alive.”
— Gloria Steinem
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