Talk about brain drain… but the wine and cheese party helped debrief!
Personally I didn’t understand any of the talks in the am. So if any one else did please share.
I went to the breakout session on massage and anxiety/depression and had some great experiences. My favorite was between Dawn Donovan and Chris Moyer. Dawn presented her research on Use of Massage Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and to Improve Sleep in Clients Participating in an Inpatient Withdrawal Management (Detox) Program: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study
What I loved most was that it was real. She started with saying how many billions of dollars are spent in the US and Canada on drug and alcohol rehab and issues each year. Her study did show that massage was successful in reducing anxiety in people who were getting off of their substance. I loved that she intuitively decided on the massage protocol which was totally different from her usual form of bodywork. Taking into consideration the clients needs , combining intuition and science is what we need more. I also think it was just the idea that it was on a topic that could actually be useful to massage therapists in getting and keeping clients or creating a job in massage.
Chris Moyer isn’t a massage therapist but is a researcher who loves massage. He is another great example of being able to take massage and measure what it is doing. He did a literature study on whether or not massage helps reduce cortisol. Interestingly he found that it does not reduce cortisol which is very contradictory to most of the research already done in this area mainly by Tiffany Field at the Touch Research Institute.
Making research understandable is the main reason I am attending this conference. I am also learning about why research is so important and what it can do for the massage profession. I think one of the big challenges is taking research and turning it into something that massage therapists can use to apply to their practice which is really just about getting and keeping clients.
I was later told by Ruth Werner that I was also witness to a rare phenomenon in research with one presenter, Ross Turchinov being intensely challenged. (I personally didn’t understand what he was trying to say or show. The studies he did refer to were all done in the 50′s-70′s and the challenger didn’t think that there was any prior proof of what he was talking about. His talk was “Impact of Massage Therapy on Electrophysiology of the Soft Tissue and Cellular Function”. I might try to talk to him tomorrow to see if he could explain it more.
There are so many well known people there from all aspects of massage- Les Sweeney (ABMP), Sydney Duncan (Massage Today), someone from COMTA but I can’t remember her name right now, AMTA presidents/officers, but hmm…. no sign of anyone from Massage Magazine.
It was such a great networking day too meeting many people who I have connected with on Facebook and www.massageprofessionals.com . I can’t wait to show you a new project on massage research that will help you make sense of research that hopefully will be done in the fall!
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