One of the confusing things in the massage profession is the definintion of medical massage. Since there isn’t any clear defininiton of what it is or who can do it, the insurance companies are starting to define it for us. Here in WA State Group Health who’s credentialing process is managed by Axia or American Whole Health is one such company who is starting that process.

The isssue is - is medical massage a technique or just the ability to bill insurance companies? Since stress is one of the biggest causes of health issues and a beginning practitioner with 100 hours of massage training can safely do massage for stress reduction, setting educational requirement that are more than this will eliminate those therapists from being able to do medical massage.

Others who work with specific diseases such as cancer and other pathologies most likely need more training to work with these people effectively but there are no set requirements for doing so because we really don’t know how much is needed.

Some groups and associations are calling medical massage a specific technique and a specific method when all one really needs is the ability to do chart notes and fill out a bill correctly and write a report for a doctor or lawyer.  I have been billing insurance companies here in Seattle since 1989 when I became a massage therapist after 250 hours of training.  I have always been paid and never been questioned as to my credentials.  Now we are even able to become providers with HMO’s and PPO’s but for the most part they don’t even pay my cash hourly wage.

So what exactly is medial massage?  Who can do it? How do we define medical massage?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Licensing and Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.