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My recommendations for the future of massage as a healthcare profession

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UPDATE, 7 March 2013: fixed to address the problem that Mended pointed out. Still not finished, but I'll leave it up so as not to inadvertently hide Mended's comment as well. Consider this a work-in-progress, rather than a finished piece. 


Elsewhere, I was asked what I thought massage needed to do in order to evolve into a healthcare profession.

Since that was a semi-closed forum that not everyone can access, I'll repeat those ideas here, and I've added some concrete examples of how to carry out those ideas.

  1. clearly and unambiguously distinguish ourselves from both prostitution and "cure cancer with baking soda"-style alternative medicine--perhaps through a tiered system with clearly-distinguishable names;

    Example: Getting involved in advocacy efforts to help get people out of "the life" of prostitution and human trafficking. Defending Our Good Name is a project in Washington state that educates massage therapists and others about the scope of the problem of human trafficking in the sex trade, how it operates in ways that affect the perception of legitimate massage practitioners, and what steps people can take to become involved in addressing the problem. Other organizations in the Seattle area, such as International Rescue Committee in Seattle, API Chaya (Asian & Pacific Islander Women & Family Safety Center), Refugee Women’s Alliance, and YouthCare, are also involved in coalitions that work to detect situations where people are unlawfully forced to work for others, and provides resources for them to escape. To make professional contacts with such groups, and to support their advocacy efforts, is a grass-roots way of emphasizing the professionalism, caring, and community involvement of massage practitioners.

  2. establish a minimum basic level of anatomical and physiological education that is not just memorized, but actively understood and applied, that you cannot graduate from massage school without demonstrating;

     
  3. have an open-source repository of evaluated evidence on massage that any stakeholder can access without a middleman, and that demonstrates the effectiveness of massage in a way that puts it outside of the opinions of other providers by demonstrating it objectively, and

     
  4. actively participate in the healthcare system building efforts that are currently going on, rather than withdrawing from it into our own little isolated silo.


     

Then, once all that is established, continue to work diligently to guard it from being watered down--because it will be a lot of hard work, and there will always be those who want the title without doing the work.


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