Have you ever noticed that no two massage therapists are alike? While we can all appreciate that artists (and massage therapy is an art) all have their own unique style, it would be helpful to the public, as consumers of massage, to encounter a field of practitioners with roughly similar levels of skill and knowledge.

Here’s why it could, and perhaps should, matter to you as a consumer. First, the education of a massage therapist prepares him or her to deal with roughly the same type of cases that an orthopedist, a neurologist, a chiropractor, or a physical therapist might attempt to help. Most people tend to pick a more experienced or more trained practitioner when they think they have a serious problem. These days, more and more people are choosing to go to massage therapists instead of doctors, chiropractors, or physical therapists. At first, they may go simply because it is relaxing and feels good. As they become more familiar with massage and its benefits, they choose to go for pain relief, injury treatment, and/or structural balancing. Do all massage therapists know how to assess the body, and know to whom and when to refer to other practitioners? The curriculum at massage schools in the southeast is so varied, that massage therapists do not all have uniformly good assessment skills. They need them.

The second reason why consumers should care, is so that they know they can go to any massage therapist, with any muscle problem, and get it handled well. Some schools tell their students to pick an area of specialization. This limits the student’s training in one area like relaxation or another, like sport’s injuries. These programs graduate practitioners who are not broad based enough to deal skillfully with any and all musculoskeletal prob-lems. Other schools try to be broader, but there isn’t enough time in a one year program to give therapists compre-hensive training in both western and eastern styles of bodywork.

A third need that consumers may or may not recognize (but it is real), is the need for massage therapists to better understand the line between bodywork and psychotherapy. Any decent health practitioner knows that mind and body are interrelated so intimately that physical symptoms often have a psychological component. The trick for the massage therapist is to deal with that reality without trying to be a psychotherapist. Very few massage schools handle this issue well enough.

Maybe the basic issue is that you cannot adequately train a massage therapist in one year. Two years of training would give massage schools the ability to round out the skills of their graduates in ways that are not accomplished in one.

Paul Waring is an educated consumer of natural health care services from Roswell, Georgia.

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