Future Of Massage Therapy

The Future of Massage Therapy - Inclusive acceptance by mainstream medicine “Inclusive acceptance from the federal health care ministry for Massage Therapy”  Percent of clients whom solicited the services of massage therapist with out the knowledge of their family doctors is quite low.  The significance of that fact is that those visits are off the radar of the mainstream medical system and thus not credited with rendering benefit to the public.  Clients of massage therapy are reluctant to ask for prescriptions from there doctors as the medical community only reluctantly recognizes massage as a beneficial modality of treatment.

- Standardized level of national competency  National standards for ethics and practice only exist in three provinces to date.  This will facilitate the portability of the profession throughout the country with only the smallest of barriers that of registration.  The intention is to eventually have national standards for practice and examination to remove inter-provincial barriers to practice  These standards are some of the highest in the world.

- Inter-professional Education within Health Care  Education within the professions about what skill set each group can bring to the table.  The integration of a variety professional to facilitate a multi-discipline approach to client centered health care.  The understanding of skill sets and where overlap of knowledge begins and end represents the common ground between groups.  These shared areas of knowledge must not be perceived as areas of conflict but points of connection where team building can take place.  The governing bodies for massage therapy within each province and territories are the advocacy groups which are pursuing the task of shifting these paradigms within the medical community in general and the federal government in particular.

- Involvement in Collaborative Health Care Teams  There are many forms of collaborative health care. Several are referred to as parallel, integrative, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary.  Typically these teams involve chiropractic, physiotherapist,  The last federal minister’s report, intended to direct the provincial medical systems talked about implementing collaborative team based health care. Never once did it mention massage therapy as a profession to be included with these teams.