Pearly Whites
I‘m headed to the dentist today. I don’t enjoy visiting the dentist. However, as a Sweeney, dental care isn’t just prudent, it is a moral imperative. My mother had dental issues in her youth, and made proper dental care her mantra when we were growing up. Any sentence relating to teeth was typically punctuated by my mom saying, “It’s so important for you kids to take care of your teeth. You don’t want to have to go through what I went through…” Well, it must have worked; all five of us have decent teeth, and a firm commitment to keeping them in good order.
I have a super-nice dentist, in whom I have great confidence. The hygienist could not be any nicer; she always asks about my family, and also takes care of my wife and kids. As dental practices go, this one seems to have everything you could ask for. But I still don’t like going. The bottom line is I need to maintain my teeth, and I would deal with going even if I didn’t like the dental care team as much as I do.
When was the last time you heard of a massage client who didn’t like her therapist, but went anyway? I never have. Massage and bodywork sessions aren’t like trips to the dentist, cholesterol checks, acute medical care, or even physical therapy. I’m not looking for a friend at these places; I need professional expertise. I appreciate finding someone I don’t mind spending time with, but I am looking for competence first and foremost. When visiting a massage therapist, I view personality and attitude as important parts of the competence I expect. One of the challenges of explaining massage therapy to the uninitiated is underscoring the fundamental intimacy of the work. As a client, it’s difficult to embrace that intimacy if you don’t respect or feel comfortable with your therapist. If I had cancer, I’d want a doctor who was well-regarded and knowledgeable; if he or she was a jerk, I’d live with it (hopefully, right?).
One of the important issues we talk about in this profession is the need for boundaries; therapists should not carry extra emotional baggage for their clients (or unload it on them, either). But a big part of being successful in a service-oriented business is generating a personal connection with your clients or customers. It CAN be done while maintaining appropriate professional and personal boundaries.
A couple months back in this blogumn I asked, “Do you love your clients?” Today the question is, “Do your clients love you?”
My clients love me because I specialize in helping people with pain and range of motion problems. I am a “muscle whisperer” and also volunteer for our local hospice helping about 20 people and their caregivers live better during their last days. I specialize in helping people who have tried everything else.
I can feel pain and problems in other people. I cannot explain it but have developed my approach by objectively seeing what produced the best results. I really think that whatever type of massage or bodywork you follow, you should do so in an evidence based framework. I use to think that it meant limiting yourself to scientifically based practices, but know understand that Holistic practices can be evidence based is you measure the results even though you cannot rationally explain the principle of what you do. I think that in this business we can offer the world what conventional and alternative medicine does not by using both haves of our brain. Left-side rational and the right-side intuitive. Learning the right-side is actually harder but you can pick up on clues that are rejected by science because the are not measurable, quantifiable or fit into something that you can rationalize.
Almost every day I witness miracles. Often I one see a person one because they feel too good to come back. I even had one client tell me that they wanted to phone work and “Call in well”. I have released nerves deep in the body or given demonstrations to two different groups of people with peripheral neuropathy who were there because medicine had giving up on them. I worked briefly on about 5 people in each group can helped each and every one. I have helped people bedridden with cancer and gotten them up and driving. I even saved a woman’s life who was hemorrhaging to death.
I orchestrate by sessions as a conversation with both the mind and body. I talk to the person and the tissues.
Boundaries serve not only for the client’s protection but yours. I have to feel the pain in them and not take it on. I cannot take on the client’s pain and with so much hospice work I have to be careful. But you also need to connect to the person and establish a sense of trust.
I am 65 and need more bodywork as well. But I think that what I do is becoming a dying art. Regulation and licensing is killing this kind of work. Right now I am studying for the MBLEx which is filled with lots of irrelevant knowledge because I need to get licensed to continue to work. Even the current BOK committee refuses to develop standards that actually can be validated as what the minimal standards to practice are. I have studied testing theory and we as a community continue to refuse to develop standards that can be use to measure whether a person has the minimal set of skills to do a professional job. Instead they are confused by the fact that massage and bodywork has a wide range of modalities that have very little in common.
I see massage and bodywork being as diverse a field as engineering. To define a BOK for all of engineering would encompass chemistry, electronic, structural design, building codes etc. I would hope that that BOK would not be use to certify or license. Yes there are lots of jobs that require cross training. One may mix computer engineering and electronic engineering or chemical engineering. The problem with tests like the MBLEx or NCE is that they either take focus on one modality like Swedish or try to span all modalities and not test the competency of any one. What about the civil engineer who can answer enough questions about electronic, chemistry, computer science etc. to compensate for his lack of civil engineering know how.
Now the tests prove nothing other than you can take a test that was developed from a arbitrary bucket list with no relation to how competent people are. It is nothing but a barrier to entry and even a greater barrier for people like me who take the road less traveled.
Comment by Carl W. Brown — October 7, 2009 @ 4:15 pm