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ABMP Podcasts for Massage Therapists & Bodyworkers

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Exploring the issues and challenges unique to the massage and bodywork community.

Subscribe to The ABMP Podcast in the Apple Podcast Store, Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you access your favorite podcasts, or click on an episode below to listen online.

Send questions, topic ideas, and guest recommendations to podcast@abmp.com, and we may answer your question on a future podcast.

 


A client has Dupuytren’s contracture, a progressive thickening and shrinking of the palmar fascia that causes her pinky finger to be bent all the time. Now it seems to be starting on the other side. Is massage safe? Can it help slow the progress? What is Dupuytren’s contracture, anyway?

Can you get too many massages? #Wellness has taken on a whole new meaning. In this episode, Allison highlights the autonomic part of the nervous system and relates it to the balance we seek in wellness and in the work we do as massage therapists. 

Tracy Walton’s belief is simple: Everyone deserves compassionate touch. She has developed guidelines that are already at work in hospitals, massage schools, and clinics across the country. This includes a pressure scale she developed, based on the work of Gayle MacDonald and Dawn Nelson. In this episode, Tracy discusses her beginnings in oncology massage, how frustration in the classroom helped develop the pressure scale, and her hopes of trauma-informed massage therapy instruction in the classroom.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), called myalgic encephalomyelopathy (ME) in other countries, is one of my least favorite topics. It is just so slippery, and we understand very little about how it comes about, how to treat it, and how massage therapy might help.

Can reducing excess tension during bodywork sessions promote career longevity? Author and educator David Lobenstine thinks so. David is a proponent of efficient practitioner performance, and during this podcast we talk about his recent article in Massage & Bodywork magazine: “Find Your Floppy.”

From appendicitis to vertigo: a quick tour through the first year of I Have a Client Who . . . episodes in alphabetical order. I am so grateful to our listeners and podcast hosts and sponsors who have made all this possible, and I’m looking forward to another great year of I Have a Client Who . . . stories!

Have you ever tried to ignore something or someone only to find that it gets amplified and becomes even more of an annoyance? In this episode, Allison compares the quadratus lumborum to being the youngest child in a very large family of very loud muscles.

Amelia Vogler had a “humdinger” of a family life growing up in North Carolina. She was influenced by both her father’s funeral home business and her mother’s horticultural background. From her father, she learned about grief and therapeutic space, and from her mother she learned about physical and spiritual blooming and flowering. Amelia joins the podcast to talk about the challenge of growing up an empath.

“There’s so much power in the very, very simple things.” Dr. Cynthia Price shares her “I Have a Client Who . . . ” story about a woman under treatment for substance use disorder, who is learning positive things about her body for the first time.

Authors Janet Penny and Rebecca Sturgeon join the podcast to discuss their new book and how it builds on the work of professional luminaries like Gayle MacDonald and Tracy Walton. We discuss mythbusting massage therapy and cancer care, working as part of an integrative team with other health-care providers, and considerations and treatment approaches.

Student’s elbow? Popeye’s elbow? Whatever you call it, an infected olecranon bursa is no joke. Lots of people have to go through several attempts to treat it, culminating in surgery to remove it. When is massage therapy safe?

When there is a fork in the road, what part of the brain do we access to choose which route to take? In this episode, Allison examines what it means to apply ourselves and drives down the road with many forks called sciatica.