I have been doing massage therapy for 18 years and have been reading the state boards website and everything I can on licensing and legilation issues and I am still not understanding the whole picture.
The thing is that there are two sides to the issue – those who think licensing is necessary to protect the public from harm, end prostitiution and create professional standards.
On the other hand are people who disagree with licensing and what it is doing to the profession. I am in that camp. My resoning for doing so has to do with the way the National Certification Board was created which you can read my version of it from what I saw happening and from what I read in the national magazines at the time about what was happening (I still have the magazines!) Keith Grant sums up most of what I had already suspected in his article on “A review of issues in massage governance”. In summary – there is no proof of harm, there is no proof that massage will reduce prostitution, there is no need for more than 500 hours of education or even 100 for that matter.
The reason why this debate is important is that it is what is and will be affecting every massage therapist at some time in their career. Politics is just about relationships. No one wants to get involved until their toes are being stepped on and then it it usually to late. Politicians, other health care professionals, INSURANCE companies and a small group of AMTA members are defining the profession.
I recently emailed the government regulations committees of all AMTA chapters to ask them about licensing issues in their state and I only got a few replies. I also asked members of my discussion group to let me know what is going on in their state and still only got a few replies. Most do not know what the laws are in their state and don’t really care. They just want to go about their business doing massage. I can’t blame them for wanting to stay out of it because it is soooo confusing and difficult to get two parties with opposing views to agree on anything.
I sometimes think that the two different sides -for and against licensing people – should get together and have a group meeting faciliatated by someone like Marshall Rosenberg (who wrote a book called ‘Non -violent Communication’. The thing we are not doing that he advocates is to talk about what we are needing. Politics tend to bring up the feelings. We get to caught up in the feelings and being heard and needing to be right that we forget or don’t even recognize what the underlying need is. I would surmise that we both have the same underlying needs- the need to be able to build and run a successful massage business.
I don’t know the answers to all of this but I do agree with Keith Grant in that apprenticeship programs are a big part of the answer, That is why I started my first site actually -www.thebodyworker.com was me starting to collect all of the information to create an apprenticeship program. And now that I have seen the results of peer supervision and clinical supervision, I would add that. There are already studies in other professions that show how successful that is in creating practitioners with integrity. I will be doing more writing and research on this very thing.
I am now working on collecting all of the different variations of state licensing scope of practice definintions and it is really scary to see the differences in what a massage therpist can do in one state and not in another.
I also will be looking into what is happening in the unlicensed states – are people having problems practicing and building practices or finding jobs? and what about Minnesota with their Health Freedom Act – is there more prostituition and less quailified massage therapists there?
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