Massage & Bodywork

March/April 2012

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THE ART AND SCIENCE OF RESEARCH M&B: What would you say to encourage others to better utilize research in their practices? RW: It is unnecessary to reinvent the wheel. If you have a client with super-dense fascia, if you have a client with morning stiffness that he or she would like to resolve, if you have a client who is recovering from cancer treatment—people have gone before you to try out what appears to work and not to work. Why start over with each client? In other words, research, along with practitioner judgment and client desires, forms the basis of evidence-informed practice. Another important application of research is in practice building. One of the most important things a massage therapist has to do is determine who his or her target market is. Once a person has figured that out, the chances are decent that some research has been developed that addresses issues that target market faces. For instance, if you want to work with elders, it's not that difficult to do a search on PubMed Central or Google Scholar to see what information has been accumulated about massage in the context of that population group. And finally, I would love to see massage therapists use the research that is available to them now to become inspired about what comes next. That might take the shape of individuals doing case reports, which is simply a careful documentation of the interaction between one therapist and one client in a format and a language that every scientist uses, or it might take the shape of massage therapists demanding the possibility of an advanced academic degree in their chosen field. I would certainly hope it would take the shape of massage therapists feeling the need to further grow research in their field, which essentially means supporting the work of the MTF. TF: Every clinician does research every day. Your client comes in, you make your observations, you make your hypotheses, you design your treatments, you apply the intervention, and you evaluate. That's research. It's also clinical practice. These concepts are not easy. Recently, I went through probably 2,000 research papers on fascia, and it took me two hours to really understand one diagram from one of the papers in a way that made sense to my clinical half. But now I can explain it clearly in just a few minutes. Clinicians might think some of it is too advanced, but you can do it and understand it just as well as anyone else; it just takes time. That's one of our goals at the next Fascia Research Congress: to present and explain things in a way that clinicians can understand so that they can better observe the things that are happening in their practices. PM: Research can help reiki practitioners feel better about what we do. Our work with clients is so subtle and the experience is very subjective, both of the reiki treatment itself and of the self-healing process that continues after the reiki hands have left the client's body. It's challenging to talk about reiki practice in a straightforward manner, especially because reiki practitioners are often not critical thinkers. This communication gap leaves many reiki practitioners feeling marginalized, and research helps bridge that gap. Reiki practitioners have every reason to walk into a medical environment with pride—but not arrogance. It's been my experience from the beginning of my foray into conventional health care 20 years ago that medicine wants the nondogmatic access to spirituality that reiki practice brings. This is perhaps the most common misconception among reiki practitioners, and it shows up in research—this sense of having to whitewash the spiritual roots of the practice. We don't need to whitewash it—it's probably the most important, most valuable, aspect of the practice. We're literally handing people a meditative experience, through which they open to their own deeper resources and sense of well-being, and, through a mechanism that science does not yet understand, optimize their bodies' self-healing mechanisms. RW: As our attitudes about health care and health-care delivery systems evolve, people are more interested in prevention, wellness, and cost-effectiveness than ever before, and massage has a role to play here. I believe that our continued focus on good, quality research will enable us to coordinate with (not work against or in spite of) other health-care professionals, so that the most important outcome—the well-being of our clients—will improve. Note 1. S.C. Friedman et al., "Effects of Reiki on Autonomic Activity Early After Acute Coronary Syndrome," Journal of the American College of Cardiology 56 (2010): 995–96. Jed Heneberry is assistant editor at ABMP. He can be reached at jed@abmp.com. Celebrate ABMP's 25th anniversary and you may win a refund on your membership. ABMP.com. 73

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