Wishes, Surveys, and Ken Burns

While it might be emotionally cathartic to have nachos with your friends and loudly bemoan your woes and frustrations, it is rarely a useful tactic for creating change. Instead— or maybe in addition to— we’re going to take a short tour into wishful thinking.

I asked this question in the Healwell Community, our private online space where we are intensely interested in finding solutions:

We have plenty of complaints about national massage therapy associations (on both sides of the border). Part of the problem with being a national org is having communication from the people doing the work. You do the work, so what do you want to see from them?

Please try to keep your answers as actionable as possible. Start your answer with “I wish [association] would do [action] to address [topic].”

There’s no way for the associations to know our wishes if we don’t say them out loud. If we want the power to come from the bottom of the pyramid, we have to accept responsibility and ownership of that power. That doesn’t mean saying “I demand you fix my problem” it means saying “I need this specific thing from you in order to fix this problem.”

These wishes aren’t necessarily what anyone expects to see, but wishes are a great way to start looking for answers in unexpected places. Wishes also make it possible to discuss the reasons why they aren’t feasible, which allows us to work from the impossible to the possible.

“I wish NCBTMB would drop Board Certification as their big push/money maker and merge with FSMTB to cooperatively create a more robust (and clear) system for vetting CEs and CE Providers.”

“I wish COMTA and AFMTE would merge and create a clear set of standards for massage therapy educators.”

“I…wish NCB would figure out a way to give massage therapists credit for taking CEs that are from other disciplines. For example, I think if a course is recognized as providing CEs for PTs or RNs or social workers, NCB should recognize it as legit CE, regardless of whether or not the instructor has paid NCB to be a recognized provider. And while I’m at it, I wish our professional organizations would encourage inter-disciplinary learning.”

“I want both ABMP and AMTA to stop asking massage therapists to volunteer to provide seated massage to legislative staffers when they and their lobbyists go to Capitol Hill and state legislatures. There is a budget for lobbyists that is pretty big. They can afford and should pay for massage therapists to join them at these events and those MTs should also receive preparation about how to talk with the people they touch at those events.”

“I wish AMTA and ABMP would stop fighting and work together. There is more than enough air for everyone.”

“I wish ABMP would offer disability insurance.”

“In my mind one of the biggest obstacles is lack of education and awareness– in the general public, and even with other health providers - as to 1) who we are 2) what we do exactly 3) how we are educated 4) How we are supervised and held accountable 5) what are the actual documented benefits at this point - not some goofy list “massage lowers blood pressure” etc etc– but a more detailed nuanced presentation based on what findings we now really have…

So how about this: a documentary about massage therapy ( is there one already?) I mean like a real high production quality professionally filmed documentary– or even a limited series– about real massage practice…

Maybe Ken Burns is available? (Cue the fiddle music– Dear Martha, I write to you from the beleaguered scorched battleground of Sally’s Day Spa and Salon– it’s been an exhausting terrifying day, and we are now left in an empty landscape strewn with soiled linen, overturned oil bottles, aching wrists, and fading hope….as I fight the deepening despair, I’m thinking only of returning home to your restorative foot rubs).”

I get my own heading, because I’m writing and formatting this article.

It is logistically difficult for a national association to understand the needs of smaller groups. The solutions that come from a national association are by definition big-tent solutions that must attempt to address the whole profession.

Not all problems are national, and not all groups need to be either. A group could focus solely on the regulations that are harming massage therapists in their state. It could focus on supporting therapists who are systemically excluded. It could teach therapists how to create and maintain relationships with their local community.

Asking national associations to fund an effort is logical, but they often end up needing to staff and continuously support the effort as well. This means the national associations become bottlenecks for efforts and initiatives.

Creating more organizations isn’t the answer by itself. Anyone who’s been involved in massage politics will tell you that a million massage organizations have been made and then fizzled out, or have been started but limp along making little impact while diverting resources. A big contributor to this pattern is that we don’t have enough people who are trained to lead groups. Nobody is born knowing how to get people to work together towards a common goal. We aren’t imbued with knowledge about writing vital (but boring) documents or the best practices in connecting team members (socially or with technology).

Therefore, I’d like the associations to fund multiple trainings that allow experts outside of massage therapy to teach massage therapists how to create and run organizations. If massage therapists who lead new efforts were taught skills like budgeting and management at the onset of the project, the groups they create would have more staying power and would potentially be better equipped to pivot as the landscape and needs shift over time.

I am aware that an effort to educate massage therapists in organizational management skills potentially creates competition for any associations supporting these efforts, but that fear comes from the scarcity mindset that is baked into all layers of our profession, and it doesn’t serve us. As one of the Healwell Community members said, “There is more than enough air for everyone.” If you don’t believe that, try “There are more than enough problems for everyone.”

It’s very important that the people who would teach massage therapist organizational skills are not part of our profession. A lot of the people who are running massage therapy organizations right now weren’t trained or educated about organizational management either, which creates a situation where the untrained are doing the training.

This has a name: Secondary Expertise.

Primary expertise is knowing and understanding something intimately, like how we understand massage in a way that physicians don’t. We are the primary experts in massage, while physicians are primary experts in disease and its treatment. Secondary expertise is essentially learning a side gig.

When secondary expertise is passed from person to person it tends to mutate, like a game of telephone. The trouble starts when there is a failure to consistently renew contact with a source of primary expertise. This can be seen in our foundational education as well as our organizational management. The people who teach foundational education rarely have prior teaching experience, training in classroom management, or formal instruction in curriculum development; they are primary experts in massage, and secondary experts in teaching. It is absolutely vital that secondary expertise is constantly exposed to primary expertise in order to maintain integrity.

I would like ABMP, AMTA, and FSMTB (listed in alphabetical order) to fund a research survey to gather data about massage therapists. Before you get all excited and tell me that AMTA has a Massage Profession Research Report I don’t know about, I do know about it and it serves a purpose, but it doesn’t serve mine. Remember, this article isn’t about complaining, it’s about asking for what you need.

• The basic intention of the report is at odds with my needs, and intention is EVERYTHING

  • The Profession Research Report is a marketing device at heart, both for AMTA and for the profession. The goal of marketing is to make yourself look good to increase sales. The goal of research is to seek truth, even when the truth hurts.

  • Massage therapy has big, scary problems that we keep under a rug. It is critical that we look those problems dead in the eye, because if we don’t know whether its mold or asbestos under that rug, we can’t make a plan to get rid of it. We need truth in order to make a plan.

  • Articles where we describe problems can be found here: The Price of Free, Massage Therapy Has a Labor Problem, The Secret Health Crisis of Massage Therapists, Why Massage Therapy Needs a Divorce, Not Another Debate

    

• The sampling is mysterious and skewed

  • The Profession Research Report surveys AMTA members. This is totally logical. However, to get accurate data about the whole profession the pool of participants can’t be limited to the members of a single organization. Exclusivity in survey participation means compromising the integrity of the data gathered.

  • The survey doesn’t disclose how many responses it gathered, which is a critical component to survey reliability.

• I don’t trust the validity of the questions

  • It was marketers who wrote them, not researchers

  • It’s really really hard to write a valid research survey. You have to take into consideration how you ask, what words you use, what connotations people answering might infer, whether you’re going to offend people, how many questions you’re asking at once, if you’re leading the witness… It’s a lot.

  • The kind of laser focus, specificity, and nit-pickiness needed to write valid, non-biased survey questions combined with the trained brain of a researcher (as opposed to a marketer) is a special combination of skills that few people have. (Luckily, we have one.)

Standard questions:

• Age

• Location

• Race/Ethnicity

• Educational background

Unique-to-us questions:

• Number of current jobs

• Number of hours per week at each job

• Dual income household status

• Years in the profession

• Work injury history

Things I personally really want to know:

• Neurodiversity rates

• Common burnout symptom rates

What do you want to see from your associations? Remember the rules for this exercise when you tell us:

• Ask for what you need to accomplish your goals.

• Don’t complain about the past; plan the future.

• Use the framing “I wish [association] would do [action] to address [topic].”

Before you post your wish, check to see if you’re self-limiting. It’s not your job to put curbs on your wishes, it’s the association’s job to tell you why your wishes aren’t possible. Then it will be everyone’s job to use that as a starting point for solutions.