Torch Meeting Report - 1-11-09

For the last several months, I've been holding informal trainings with my therapists and today a major shift occurred. I invited 3 new therapists to our meeting and an idea that's rumbled in my thoughts for a long time is now taking shape.

The idea is to create a staff or affiliation of highly skilled and professional body workers (my vision sees a solid 8 individuals with 4 alternates) that can grow and work together for the sake of the team and for the sake of their own individual growth. The right team is always better than the sum of the individual parts.

As I pass the torch, I want to help my therapists live their dreams. What I hold in my heart is that if I can help them and thousands of folks on the planet, then my dreams can come true.

If they want to learn to be the best therapist they can be that's fantastic and I completely support that -- But I've encouraged them to go further and reach higher. At the same time I will encourage all of you to stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone. That's where growth occurs. Think big and big things will happen!

I understand the road of a massage therapist. I've lived it for close to 30 years. I want you to put aside all the love and healing you do for a living and let's talk business. Robert Kiyosaki, author of numerous books on wealth has said it best in his best seller, Rich Dad, Poor Dad -- You can never attain true wealth just working for yourself or working for someone else. There's not enough hours in the day to create wealth and true freedom -- see a quick youtube presentation . Robert will explain the realities of being self employed and my advice is that you can be more as you continue your massage therapy business. I encourage you to investigate some of the options I've chosen for myself -- just drop me an email at dapassingthetorch@gmail.com.

Well our meeting today was great. We had my regular therapists -- Risa, Dov and Elaine joined my brand new folks Amanda, Chris and Brian. The new therapists brought great energy and have over 60 years of experience collectively.

The topic today was trigger point therapy addressing the hip and lower back. I ran my brand new video camcorder (Wow -- Sony SR11 with a 60 gig hard drive on board). I hope to get some video up asap (As soon as I learn to do it).

We discussed trigger point therapy and with the beauty of the web you can gain instant access to most of the literature we covered -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_point. It's amazing to have this info at your fingertips.

Here's a few excerpts from this site:

The term "trigger point" was coined in 1942 by Dr. Janet Travell to describe a clinical finding with the following characteristics:

• Pain related to a discrete, irritable point in skeletal muscle or fascia, not caused by acute local trauma, inflammation, degeneration, neoplasm or infection.
• The painful point can be felt as a tumor or band in the muscle, and a twitch response can be elicited on stimulation of the trigger point.
• Palpation of the trigger point reproduces the patient's complaint of pain, and the pain radiates in a distribution typical of the specific muscle harboring the trigger point.
• The pain cannot be explained by findings on neurological examination.

What I find most interesting is how different histologically a trigger point region is from normal tissue. Biopsy tests found that trigger points were hyperirritable and electrically active.

Now what does all that mumbo jumbo mean. From my understanding, there are muscle cells that are functioning abnormally and fractured components of the cell cannot properly process the flow of electrical ions thus creating and sustaining focal, localized muscle cell contractions (biochemists feel free to chime in and help me out).

What's most important to know is that massage methods can come to rescue and bring relief to these type of problems. In our class today we covered elbow, knee and forearm compression to the lower back and hips. I demonstrated myofascial stripping of the paraspinals and we (Dov and I) even did a little tandem treatment to the hips.

With our model on the side position, we looked at some press and stretch techniques applied to the psoas and iliopsoas. I feel the side position is one of the best ways to treat this area. Then we applied this stretch and press techniques to the adductors.

It was a tremendous class and I'm certain this is the beginning of great things to come. Stay tuned for some video clips from this meeting.