This is the second half of my discussion of the vocabulary I developed at the International Massage Therapy Research Conference. They’re not in any particular order, but feel free to check out Part 1.
First, I’ll start with a story.
When I was in massage school in Ohio, big changes were taking place. We were going to be one of the last groups taking the Ohio Board exams, and the whole state was going to switch over to the MBLEx after we did so. This also meant a huge transition in curriculum. We were learning Kellogg’s techniques and terminology, and the newer students were learning someone else’s terms. So our last quarter, my instructors decided to give us a crash course in the new stuff, so that we could communicate effectively.
It got pretty confusing.
For a year and a half, “friction” meant friction between your hand and the client’s skin. Suddenly, it meant no such thing, but creating friction between one layer of the client’s tissues and another. Our old friction was now … gliding, maybe? I don’t actually remember. But we’d differentiated between friction, gliding, and stroking, and here they were all the same thing.
Then I got out of school, and not only did people not use the terms I’d learned the first time around, they weren’t using the new ones either. In 20 months of massage school, I’d never dealt with French terms like effleurage. I thanked my lucky stars for my one disastrous semester of college French and learned these too.
Then I’d read other therapist’s SOAP notes, where one had done trigger point therapy on a client, and another had done neuromuscular therapy, and I just prayed I was doing something similar enough to what seemed to be helping the person. What was the difference? How could I be sure?
All of it left me with the feeling that nobody knows what the heck anybody else is talking about half the time.
Where is the … bathroom? Did I say that right?
So imagine how thrilled I was when I was at the International Massage Therapy Research Conference and learned that some smart people had thought about this already, and developed a common language for all of us to communicate with each other, both inside and outside the massage therapy community.
SUPER THRILLED, let me tell you.
The taxonomy of massage techniques accounts for all kinds of different massage techniques and names them in plain English. Direct pressure is just direct pressure. Resistive stretching is resistive stretching, and I no longer have to go into a five-minute explanation of how I’m not a Reiki practitioner when people read that I used muscle energy technique. There are names for some things I’m ashamed to say I never thought were important enough to make a note of before, like directed breathing. It’s like having one of those pocket bilingual phrasebooks on hand, only instead of English to Spanish, it’s Massage Therapist to Ordinary Human Being. And I kind of love that.
I know the taxonomy isn’t in common use yet. Untill it becomes integrated into our massage school programs, it’ll never be our lingua franca across disciplinary boundaries, common to all.
But even if it’s not every massage therapist’s go-to vocabulary list yet, that doesn’t mean I can’t make it mine.
Communication means nothing if you’re not understood. Now I have one powerful new tool to help me make that understanding happen. Great stuff!
photo credit: Javier Kohen via photopin cc
