A lot of people still think of massage as a luxury item – something just for the rich and famous. I think of massage as preventive medicine – the best kind of medicine there is! What do you think?
Sure, a good massage can feel luxurious. (A bad massage feels like…well, you know.) But to think that massage is just a luxury item only for the well-to-do is to not understand the benefits and the value of massage. The benefits are numerous – you know them – increasing blood circulation, reducing stress and pain, enhancing lymphatic flow and the immune system, etc. But a lot of ‘those other people’ out there still don’t know that massage is more than just pampering. We continue to have a big job in communicating these wonderful ‘side effects’ of massage – every chance we get.
For me, massage was a necessity. I had a serious low back injury that had me flat on my back for 3 months several years ago. When you’re looking surgery in the face, you start looking for alternatives. I was fortunate to experience the benefits of massage and Cranial-Sacral Therapy by having therapists come into my home and work on me. And the physical therapists I saw at the Texas Back Institute were highly skilled at Direct Myofascial Release. I also learned about and processed through the emotional undercurrents of my condition. The result was that I was able to avoid surgery and move on with my life. Maybe you or someone you know had a similar experience…
Massage worked as powerful preventive medicine for me. And over the years, I’ve seen this repeated with hundreds of my clients. You probably have, too. But my insurance company had no clue how much money they saved because I took responsibility for my health – learning about alternatives, hiring therapists to work on me – with no help from the insurance company at all.
I know there are a few insurance companies – mostly on the West and East coast – that understand they save money by paying for massage and other alternatives rather than surgeries and years of painkillers. But most insurance companies just see massage as a ‘luxury’, too. And it’s hard for them to see the value of preventive medicine. They can’t measure it! They don’t know how to value it!
Our health care system is a symptom care system, for the most part. It’s easier to put a value on a procedure, a test, an operation, hospital stays, and medications. If they valued preventive medicine, such as massage, they would pay doctors – or LMTs – to keep people healthy, instead of only valuing how well they can treat symptoms after the fact. But how would they know how much to pay them? It’s hard to measure surgeries and procedures and medications that WON’T have to be done and paid for because of the good work of a massage therapist – or even a doctor or nurse!
It’s a paradox. I know there are pockets of places in the world (including one hospital in China) where they attempt to value preventive health care – i.e. paying practitioners for how healthy they keep their patients/clients. But for now, it’s still mostly a communication process that there’s a whole lot more to massage than feeling ‘luxurious’.