Massage therapy eases into medical mainstream
Massage therapy eases into medical mainstream
Inpatient and outpatient opportunities abound
When patients at St. Joseph’s Hospital of Atlanta need a massage, Kay Starnes, CMT, LMT, is summoned from the St. Joseph’s Specialty Center for Wellness and Rehabilitation. She often works with heart surgery patients, heart transplant patients, and cancer patients.
Patients waiting for a heart are sometimes very sick and bedridden for three months at a time. Someone lying in a for bed that long gets stiff and deconditioned. These patients have a lot of back and neck pain, explains Starnes.
Massage increases circulation and also helps lymph move through the body. For cancer patients who are repeatedly poked and prodded by clinicians, massage calms them down and makes them feel better, she says.
"Before I work with a patient, I check with the nurse to see if there is anything I should know. Usually, it is the nurses that ask me to work on the patients," says Starnes. She also obtains physician approval. There are times when massage is contraindicated or at least should be given on a limited basis. Such contraindications include skin fragility; site of injury, surgery, or procedure; areas of inflammation or infection; deep vein thrombosis; white cell count below 20,000; unstable spine; hemophilia; and platelet count below 20,000.
Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar, MN, is just beginning to incorporate massage into patient care. "We want to have inpatient and outpatient massage therapy available," says Nancy Drange, RN, BSN, CMT, CETN, a nurse and certified massage therapist at the hospital. "We will start out doing the massage fee-for-service; however, we are trying to implement the program whereby the people who could not afford it would be allowed to use funds from the hospital’s foundation." Medicare and Medicaid do not cover massage therapy, she explains.
An infant massage class currently is being offered at Rice Memorial. Parents attend four one-hour classes to learn how to massage their babies. Massage helps with the discomfort of teething and colic, helps babies sleep better, and promotes parent/child bonding, says Drange.
Employees at Rice Memorial also benefit from massage. Drange does seated chair massage two afternoons a week working the kinks out of shoulders, necks, arms, and hands. The cost is $10 for a 15-minute massage.
Physical therapy also is a natural setting for massage. "We use massage therapy at the beginning of a treatment to relax the patient," says Norma Marrero, PT, director of physical therapy at Heartland Florida Sports Medicine in Homestead. "Massage increases circulation, getting more oxygen to the cells, which helps repair tissue. It also reduces a lot of the muscle spasms."
For a treatment, massage is usually used at the site of the injury. Massage also is used as a treatment entity in and of itself for soft-tissue damage and trigger point work, she says.
The medical community has become much more accepting of the benefits of massage, says Venice Sullivan, CNMT, director of Hope Wellness Institute in Carmichael, CA. She has many clients who are referred by physicians. Medical doctors are beginning to understand that many problems that take years to correct are greatly helped by a competent therapist doing good massage, says Sullivan.
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