As a martialist myself, I especially enjoy working with martial artists and fighters.

 

One of the more interesting groups out there is a set of Aikido stylists that emphasize their art as a chance for peacemaking.

They are gearing up again to promote their signature events, timed to coincide with United Nations Peace Day in September.

 

Why would martial artists take such an interest in peace?
Training in martial arts means learning about fighting in a disciplined and relatively safe manner.
In this, martialists learn to both respect the danger of violent conflict, and to face it without fear.

Such people are uniquely prepared to choose peace if the chance arises.
Extending the ideas of one art  ”Aiki peace week” ( http://aikipeaceweek.org/ ) explores this fascinating topic in events at different martial schools around the world.

 

Cool stuff :)

I’ve talked more than once here about integrative medicine.

I am a big advocate of continuing to learn about a problem, and continuing to get new perspectives.  That can include combining different treatments, and for complex conditions probably should.

 

But sometimes it isn’t clear what that is supposed to look like.

Here’s a take on it from someone else you can consider.

It was fun last week to remember a very early experience with manual therapy.

 

At that point in my life, I didn’t think of it as such.  I had no other contact with manual therapies as a practice, and certainly not with massage therapists.

 

I struggle to recall any other exposure to MT in my young life.

I had other illnesses that many do.  I had one broken bone in high school.

But I can’t recall manual therapies coming up again.

 

And so the next thing I can remember was not until university.

Focused quite fully on training around my taekwondo club, I worked up to 2 – 4 hours a day of total training, 6 days a week.  And that was around being a full-time student.

Not having much experience or help with how to train, avoiding overuse injuries was a constant challenge.

 

My peers and I were always trying new things and learning from each other.

It was one of my best friends who found a sport self-massage book in the library.

We started trying what I would now call an aggressive longitudinal stripping of big muscles we could reach – basically thighs & legs – after training.

This is not what I would recommend today.  But it still made a big improvement.

 

Once I started doing that, it was so much easier to stay on track and stay healthy even with a high volume of activity.

( until I decided I could add an ice skating class on top of my own training… not a good idea )

 

 

With all my exploration of training and therapy around martial arts, I finally realized a career in some kind of physical medicine was for me.

But I still had no idea that there was such a thing as Massage Therapy.

 

I finished my undergraduate degree with a custom, interdisciplinary major in health sciences and cultural studies in health.

Even in classes focused on alternative medicine, MT did not really come up.

 

Only after exploring several other options that didn’t stick did I get that “a-ha” moment.

It was a second-hand experience where a friend of my parents had come to rely on massage therapy for pain relief.

A former athlete, this person had intractable back pain, despite the full (1990′s) program of invasive lumbar surgeries.

Only highly-skilled manual therapies brought relief.

 

I was fascinated.  And I was rather quickly hooked.

 

There is nothing else that offers such an opportunity to combine head skills and hand skills and make an impact.

Inspired to health care by my love of performance and movement arts, this was irresistible.

Manual therapies are amazingly creative when it comes to the hand skills that make manual assessment and treatment meaningful.

And at the same time, that doesn’t accomplish anything without learning the best direction to go with those skills.

 

So here I am.

:)

 

 

 

I’m very often asked how I came to massage therapy as a career.In truth it was rather late in life after much exploration.

 

Looking back, my first experience I can remember with manual therapies was indeed when I was quite young.

At some point in grade school I had some rather persistent respiratory infection.  It lead to dramatically thickened secretions inside the airways that became stuck in place and blocked breathing.

What to do?

“Cupping”.

My mother was taught to use old-fashioned percussive contact on my ribs (with a curved hand to try to project broad force from air pressure inward), to help shock free the stuck airways to move things out.  It seemed to work.

 

That was the last MT I can remember for a very long time . . .

(to be continued tomorrow :)  )

( ok, I really meant the next post…   ;)  )

You know we can’t resist sharing sometimes when there’s important news about public health, even when it isn’t exciting.

 

Well this is about as boring as it gets.

 

Because it’s about nothing.

 

That’s what happens to a gigantic proportion of science out there, including science about making you more healthy and performing better.

Nothing.

 

And that’s a problem.
Because when we don’t get all the information, we can’t make the best decisions.

That goes for clinicians “in the field”, and for researchers that shouldn’t waste time reinventing the wheel.

 

But today, almost all the attention goes only to the latest good news.

Even in research involving live, human volunteers, there is often no accountability for sharing the outcomes.

Too often we only find out what happens when enough special interests benefit.

 

And that holds us all back.

 

AllTrials.net is leading a movement to change this.

They’re gathering relevant stakeholders to say we really should try a better way.

 

I encourage you to check it out and sign their online petition.

 

This year continues to be a great one for new information about performance.

One of our favorite topics is healthy performance in young people.

 

We all want success to also be a happy path.

And here’s another perspective that suggests it should be.  This one is a bit science-y again, but it’s a great message.

This new path of investigation tried to correlate hours of “free play” – think normal childhood – with injury rates.

They looked specifically at tennis players only, to try to compare “apples-to-apples”.

They found that for this group, a higher ratio of play to organized training went along with reduced injuries.

 

This measurement should be repeated across many groups to see if it is a rule.

I know we’ll be watching!

 

In the meantime, I’d go play :)

 

On Monday, we shared some very interesting basic research on whether or not the frequency of massage therapy matters.

While we might think it obviously does, it’s important to try to attach some kind of measurement to that.

 

We don’t really want to guess, but deliberately align the right treatment with the right people . . . .   and at the right time?

 

Another basic research ( science-y :-) )  report released recently addressed this question.

Folks right here at Ohio State compared immediate with delayed or no MT after a simulated physical event.

 

RunnersWorld.com published a great summary last week.

 

This work starts to attach some useful measurements to recovery with MT.

I like their choice:  pre- and post-activity strength.

 

And the immediate MT group came out well ahead.

Obviously :)

Certainly one of the biggest questions folks have when they come into the office is how often they need to come back to get better.

 

The truth is that, like much of physical medicine, we don’t really have a solid answer.

We have heuristics, based on clinical experience and some longitudinal research, that suggest how to get started and how to know if we’re on track.  And then we can “titrate” the “dose” based on actual outcomes.

One of the marks of an excellent therapist is hitting that “dose” right early, being efficient for everyone’s sake.

 

As an emerging profession, massage therapy has a little less on the research side.

But here’s a great new contribution, summarized by the Massage Therapy Foundation.

Going broadly from once-weekly to twice-weekly visits for MT had a significant effect on the body, here specifically in some hormone and immune cell levels in the blood.

 

I hope this motivates additional work on dose-related effects of MT, and, indeed, related work on mechanisms of action such changes imply.

 

 

I love TED videos.

If you haven’t watched them at all, you really should.  (It’s easy to start at TED.com - pick your favorite category and go.)

 

If you want an especially relevant place to start, how about TEDMED!

TEDMED is one of the “home office” events for TED.  It is held annually at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

 

They have made the first announcement for speakers for 2013!

 

As always, it is a great, multi-disciplinary mix that addresses challenges from one-on-one patient interactions to broad, health system philosophies.

 

Check it out.

And let me know if you find a public simulcast in central Ohio :) !

After our recent posts remembering how happy we are for your support last year and also how well MT advanced as a profession, I can’t resist sharing another great top-10 list for 2012.

John Weeks, the long-time author of The Integrator Blog, pulled together 10 top happenings across integrative medicine as a whole.

I agree very much with his view that  medicine properly includes all things that are demonstrably useful.

 

As it is today, habits, educational tradition, and payments systems still demand some separation of drugs-and-surgery and everything-else.

But as his article points out, this continues to change.  And it is changing fast.

 

I’m excited to do my part with TrueMT to help demonstrate the proper use of MT, and to advocate for the big family of truly integrated medicine.

Let’s go 2013!