Today I read this article and this article on Painscience.com
I found this guy in 2018 while looking for relief from plantar fasciitis, shin splits, and quad tendinopathy accrued while pretending to train like an olympian. He recommended self massage, stretching, hydro, etc., while admitting that these are often nebulous, tricky, and persistent problems. That was part of how I caught my massage bug.
This article is critical, but I don't think it's unfair, either, it's just a more scientific/traditional approach than is taught in massage therapy school. In general, I don't like to pin myself down to any particular framework, especially a purely rational/scientific one, but I think it's worthwhile to sit with these views. In the same way, I don't think a lot of people at our school would appreciate an article like this, and while I have enough bad experience with the medical industrial complex to also share dissident views, I don't think it's sufficient to say "doctors bad, massage therapy FTW" either--that's just playing musical chairs between superiority-inferiority complexes.
The middle way of Buddhism describes "freedom from extreme views", i.e. nihilism vs eternalism, but I also think it applies to real world viewpoints (this is in my understanding the basis of approaches like integral theory). It's hard to not get defensive or panic while reading these articles. We have such an innate desire for certainty; we want to immediately register new information as either true or false.
This article mostly make me want to be a more precise practitioner, perhaps informing how I study and practice down the road. It makes me want to start slow and simple and first provide really good, relaxing massage before getting ahead of myself. Also, the author notes that the CMTO curriculum is one of the world's best ;)
I don't think that the absence of current evidence towards certain techniques or approaches means they are devoid of value (especially emotional value, which the author clearly supports, and which is obviously less quantifiable than other outcomes). The author is also pretty open about why and how it's hard to get accurate data on this stuff, that good research is (hardly) emerging.
I don't think this article frames the ultimate perspective for me, and I don't think it has to be in contradiction to everything we learn in school, though it makes me desire more care and clarity around what I'm learning and practicing.
The results on anxiety and depression are very encouraging. If anything, much of the article and especially the final section are huge vouchers for what brought me here in the first place: emotional/psychological benefits, and even "rais[ing] self-awareness":
It would be silly for me to claim that I know what “psychologically profound” actually means (in reference to anything, not just massage). But I do think that a lot of fresh, novel sensory stimulation can quite literally raise self-awareness. Receiving massage is kind of like a guided meditation that brings your attention not only to many specific parts of your body. Noticing that you feel vulnerable here but robust and comfortable there can be subjectively valuable information, new self knowledge.
This article mostly makes me curious and want to participate (treat, teach, maybe even research) in a future where treatment is better understood and (hopefully, as a consequence) treatment is better (and more accessible), while also deepening a connection with the spiritual dimensions of practice.
