The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS 

With all the bombshell headlines bombarding us this week, you’d be right to wonder why I would bother to focus on the massage industry and the training and certification that should prepare for those practicing it. You’d have every reason to dismiss it as a personal, perhaps touchy, topic hardly worth your time.

Who really cares if the massage industry is regulated?

I do, for one, though the market of one I represent is hardly justification. Much as I love a good massage, much as I appreciate the health value massage delivers - relieving tension, reducing stress, improving circulation, stimulating muscles - the fact is I just had the first treatment in a year. So I’m a pretty poor example of a massage consumer though one day if I win the lottery…

No, this is not personal, it is a matter of principle and when it comes to health, principles are all-important. The reality is that almost everything to do with the body, with what we eat, what we drink, what prepared foods we buy for our dogs and pets is regulated. Heck, even the food we feed the fish in our aquarium or the hamster running on a wheel in the cage is regulated. Some would say over-regulated, but at least we know – or believe we know – that what we are putting in our mouths and bodies passes some sort of test. It won’t poison us, though if we consume too much processed food we know the potential consequences.

The point is everything we do related to our bodies internally is regulated in one way or another and we can choose to accept or reject. We have information before us to guide our decisions. Yet in The Bahamas, unlike a lot of other places, what can be done to our bodies is not. It’s buyer beware with no certification requirements that differentiate hundreds of providers of a service with the same name.

We can presume that the therapist in a stunning resort spa is highly trained and qualified and meets the highest standards. And maybe the individual at a neighbourhood salon does, too, but we have no way of knowing because there are no academic training requirements to rub someone down. It’s a tame version of an unregulated frontier, a wild, wild West on a sheet and hard, flat bed.

Where the greatest danger lies is not in the parlour where the patron is poised for happy endings, but in the practice that overlaps physiotherapy or makes a pretext of doing so. That is not to say that there is not the extraordinary individual who has had little or no formal training but over years has developed some knowledge of bones, muscle groups, nerves, joints, and can ease pain or build an athlete’s core. There are savants who sense internal wellness by feeling the palm of a hand, but they are rare as is the untrained, but experienced body manipulator.

In The Bahamas, while massage is not regulated, physiotherapy is a tightly regulated industry. There is an association of physiotherapists who take their profession seriously and who serve with diligence. It is not surprising that their blood curdles when they see a non-certified, non-regulated massage therapist working out of a backyard or storefront posing as a physio, a fact that happens all too regularly, they say.

Regulating the massage industry would only bring greater benefit to it. In California, for instance, it is not unusual for a well-established therapist to earn $100,000 a year. In Florida, there are strict regulations.

A therapist must be certified by an approved institution, course work is a minimum of 500 credit hours, can take up to a year and licenced therapists are required to take continuing education updating or renewing their certification every two years with a minimum of 24 credits. One therapist I spoke with passed the 500 required credits and went on to earn 850 because she wanted to know as much as she could about what makes a body function at its best.

There are proper courses available in The Bahamas, including at BTVI. There are also shams. So long as the industry remains a free-for-all, the consumer has no guaranteed way to know how well the person who lays hands on them understands what goes on below the skin, in that intricate and astonishing maze of nerves and muscles, joints and bones.

It is impossible to know if that individual laying hands on you understands what happens along that 26-foot corridor known as intestines or the five foot stretch of the large colon. It is impossible to know how much they know about the 206 bones in the body or what causes the back pain that nearly four out of every five people will suffer from at some point in their lives.

If our dog food is worthy of regulation, should those who have our bodies in their hands not be subjected to the same rigour? Unless, of course, it is the story with a happy ending and not the profession of true, health-giving, life-enriching massage? This is a touchy subject, I get it, but given the need to understand what lies beneath the exterior layer of skin, the anatomy, physiology and biology of the human body, it’s time to consider a new approach to a delicate hands-on trade, time to take that which has the capability of taking us to a better place in our health to a higher plane in their profession and to reap the rewards for those who provide and those who consume.