{"id":1471,"date":"2019-03-13T09:00:58","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T22:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.amt.org.au\/?p=1471"},"modified":"2019-03-11T15:24:54","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T04:24:54","slug":"improving-quality-of-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.amt.org.au\/index.php\/2019\/03\/13\/improving-quality-of-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Quality of Care"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Toby Coy<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The massage therapy industry is a beautiful mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students finish their studies and are launched into a world of conflicting information, contradictory models of care, and potentially unhelpful professional stereotypes. As if navigating these choppy waters wasn\u2019t hard enough, we also exist in a health care system that is becoming increasingly integrated across health professions. We need to be able to communicate our scope and methodology to health providers who may know nothing about massage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, however great the current diploma of remedial massage is \u2013 and I do believe that it can produce great therapists who help their clients \u2013 one thing it fails to provide is a robust account of what we are actually doing. As our postural and tissue-based models continue to age, the task of updating our clinical reasoning and effectively collaborating with up-to-date professionals becomes increasingly difficult. To use an analogy with tennis: it is difficult to keep up with modern players if you\u2019re still using a wooden racquet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rethinking Our Practice<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

For better or worse, we aren\u2019t the only profession that struggles with the baggage of outdated ideas. In a recent conversation about applying pain science to clinical reasoning, a student physiotherapist in the second year of their masters program told me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOff in the distance there\u2019s this beautiful simplicity where everything fits together \u2026 But in between here and there is a thick forest and I have no idea how to get through. Sometimes I feel like I\u2019m getting it, but mostly I have no idea whether I\u2019m heading in the right direction. I feel like I\u2019m being taught all these assessment models and then need to immediately discard them.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can relate. As a student I was particularly interested in Myofascial Release (MFR). It became a useful mental scaffold to hang my clinical reasoning from. Patterns of pain, postural deviation and treatment strategies all unfolded from an assessment of myofascial dysfunction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later on I discovered that the science behind MFR relied on an awful lot of wishful thinking. I had to rethink my entire practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The result was a kind of professional free-fall; both stressful and exciting. I could see the emergence of a new understanding of treatment that stripped away unsupported models of dysfunction and looked at the whole person, which was exhilarating. But I also frequently felt lost, frustrated and disillusioned. It was wonderful, and awful. It also could have been completely avoided if my diploma had featured a mental model of what we do that was bigger than the treatment of structure, connective tissue or pet techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the tonal centre of massage?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In music theory there is the concept of a tonal centre: the \u2018home base\u2019 note around which other notes in a scale sit. It \u2018sounds right\u2019 whenever we return to the tonal centre, and the notes seem to fit together around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was a student, one of my teachers emphasised that knowledge of anatomy would be our bread and butter. That made sense to me at the time but now I disagree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We cannot change anatomy with our hands.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Structural variations do not predict pain, injury or functional capacity, yet our clients feel better. The results of massage \u2013 profound as they can be \u2013 are first and foremost changes in perception. They are changes in how the body feels. With that in mind, the basis of our work must instead be in the science of pain, sensation, perception and, more broadly, the biopsychosocial model of health. This is the science of the lived experience or the forest rather than the trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Other Professionals Understand Massage Therapy<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

An exercise physiologist (EP) recently reached out to me for advice on effective collaboration with a massage therapist on a persistent pain case. The massage therapist was hunting for unnecessary and unsupported treatment targets in a well-meaning attempt to provide quality care. Viewed from a certain angle, it makes sense: if massage relaxes tight muscles and the client felt much better after their massage, it would indicate that a large part of the problem was that their muscles are too tight (or their fascia, or their ligaments, or their craniosacral rhythm, or \u2026).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The EP wanted advice on how to explain that manual therapy does not have to try to fix things in order to be useful. They wanted to politely explain that it is enough to provide an hour of relaxation, interoception<\/a>, non-threatening movement, and novel stimulation in order to be of benefit. It is tragic that a professional with absolutely no background in manual therapy might understand our worth more than we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same day, I was liaising with a physiotherapist about a shared client with shoulder pain. The physiotherapist was confused because I had found a way of gently stretching the skin over the painful shoulder that provided relief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018That\u2019s odd. What do you think that is? Placebo?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was odd to them because I had obviously not done anything that could have changed the person\u2019s muscles or other tissues. As if tactile stimulation and a comforting context was not enough to modify pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s little wonder that other health professionals may have a confused picture of what massage therapists do if we haven’t got a coherent narrative to approach our interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pondering the Way Forward<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

How long will we continue to teach obsolete models of how and why people feel better from manual therapy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it time we connected the dots at the earliest levels of our professional education, to save therapists from the burden of earnestly applying a model of care known to be disruptive and outdated?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we don\u2019t, will the field of manual therapy continue to languish in the pursuit of irrelevant treatment targets and be baffled by its own successes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Author<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Toby Coy is a Remedial Massage Therapist based in Sydney. He enjoys tennis, reading, cooking and computer programming. His professional interests are in the implementation of biopsychosocial care and exploring what we are actually doing during manual and exercise therapy. He has dreams about developing software to make BPS care easier to implement.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Massage therapy struggles with the baggage of outdated ideas. How can Massage Therapists rethink their practice to keep up with other professions? Toby Coy shares his thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,2],"tags":[315,14,373,372],"class_list":["post-1471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-clinical-practice","category-professional-practice","tag-biopsychosocial","tag-interoception","tag-quality-of-care","tag-toby-coy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1597,"url":"https:\/\/blog.amt.org.au\/index.php\/2019\/04\/24\/case-study-getting-the-benefits-of-a-massage-treatment-to-stick\/","url_meta":{"origin":1471,"position":0},"title":"Case Study: Getting the benefits of a massage treatment to “stick”","author":"admin","date":"24\/04\/2019","format":false,"excerpt":"What happens when a client leaves your treatment room feeling better but returns the following week with the same issues? 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