To complement this issue’s theme on posture, let’s discuss a common postural problem among many older Americans: the hyperkyphosis that often accompanies osteoporosis.
Twenty-five years ago, Michael Takatsuno was a tennis pro suffering the aches and pains customary to athletic endeavors. A debilitating injury and a chance encounter with a Zentherapy bodyworker set him on a path that led, after many years of experimentation and study, to the development of a muscle therapy system to reduce pain and chronic muscle tension. He calls it PUSH, for power under soft hands, and it’s definitely a push in the right direction. According to Takatsuno, the PUSH approach not only brings relief to the client, it’s also gentle on the therapist.
In our previous column, (“Kinese: The Language of Movement,” December/January 2007, page 18), we thought about how we might intervene earlier in the development of poor postural habits, under the principle of “as the twig is straightened, so grows the tree.” In that discussion, we introduced the concept of Kinese—the language of movement. This is the nonverbal language a baby speaks in its first year, and it was suggested that we—therapists, parents, adults in general—would do well to learn it.
Massage therapy helps to decrease blood pressure, right? Not necessarily. It may depend on the type of massage applied, according to researchers at the National University of Health Sciences in Lombard, Illinois. In a study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (2006), Jerrilyn Cambron, DC, and her team report the effects on blood pressure change for six types of massage administered to a group of one hundred fifty normotensive and prehypertensive adults.
“Probably your own death will be caused by your last inflammatory response.”1
—Ed Friedlander, Pathguy.com
Ever since I came on board Massage & Bodywork, I have used this column to discuss pathology for massage therapists. I have introduced ideas about cortisol secretion, sleep deprivation, and what happens when pregnancy overlays autoimmune disease. In this issue, I will take on one of the most complex, aggressive, protective, and potentially dangerous of all natural processes—inflammation.
If you do a Google search for medical massage, you will turn up 3,210,000-plus entries. Clearly something of a large dimension is developing in this potential sector of our rapidly growing profession. And, as is the case with any broad movement, there are a variety of motives and presumed goals in play.
A largely grass roots phenomenon is beginning to institutionally encounter one of the most prosperous and prestigious—and most heavily regulated—organizations in the United States, and it seems to me that careful thought will be required as to just what this may mean.
My massage story begins in 1918. A three-year-old girl resented her new baby brother and wished he were dead. A few days later the baby was dead. The girl didn’t know about the 1918 flu—she thought she had killed her brother. Fast-forward twenty-four years to 1942: this very same girl—now a woman—had her first child, a boy, and her long repressed guilt came flooding back. As she struggled with her feelings, her child was fed and clothed, but was touch deprived. Jump another fifty-four years to 1996.
As the public’s interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continues to skyrocket, hospitals are beginning to tap into that demand and create new revenue streams at the same time. As a result, the development of hospital-based massage therapy practices are beginning to grow. A new U.S. survey conducted by Health Forum, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association, shows that the number of hospitals offering massage therapy has increased by more than one-third during the past two years.1
Floating along enjoying her massage, Sally is startled when her practitioner suddenly applies a noisy electric percussive device to her back.
Bob grows increasingly perplexed and frustrated when his massage therapist silently holds her hands above his injured knees for several minutes. He wonders when the massage will start.
Massage therapist Tina Allen was making one of her routine hospital visits when the father of a hospitalized child approached her with a question. Allen is director of the Children’s Program for The Heart Touch Project in Los Angeles, California, a nonprofit group providing compassionate touch to local homebound and hospitalized men, women, and children. The father’s little girl was only six years old, severely injured in an auto accident, and now quadriplegic. “He recognized my Heart Touch shirt and asked if I had given his daughter a massage,” Allen says.
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