Chapter 3: Therapeutic Massage and the Stress Epidemic 1 CE Hour
By: April Pilz, LMT Course overview
The purpose of this course is to discuss the positive role professional therapeutic massage can play in the stress epidemic in our modern culture. We will examine the negative physiological and biochemical processes that occur in the body under stress and counteract them with the Learning objectives After completing this course, the learner will be able to: Define stress in clinical terms and describe its effects on the body and brain. Identify the effects of stress on the body and the difference between acute and chronic stress. Examine the relationship between our modern lifestyle and our indicated levels of stress, and how this relationship has evolved in a post-pandemic world.
beneficial processes that occur in the body during massage. We will also look at the cultural symptoms that contribute to our collective stress and discuss the statistics that qualify stress as a national epidemic.
Recognize current cultural norms of overstimulation and overmedication. Identify the physiological, neurological, and biochemical changes that take place during therapeutic massage and their role in reducing stress. Establish the importance of consistent therapeutic massage as a long-term stress-reducing practice.
INTRODUCTION
body and brain during stress and how those processes can be reversed by therapeutic massage. In addition to taking a closer look at the physiological effects of stress, we will look at the bigger picture to understand the epidemic proportions stress has reached in our society and what we, as therapists, can do about it. There is no denying that the Covid-19 pandemic was an international crisis that left an indelible mark on our collective psyche that seems to have created a shift in priorities that has more people looking for methods of stress reduction and self-care. As our professions slowly but surely achieve recognition as a valid treatment tool by the medical community, we need to define and claim our role as practitioners and professionals in that community to further advance our industry. We will also discuss statistics and current research so that we can advocate for the efficacy of therapeutic massage to treat stress with a body of knowledge to back up our claims. First, we will define what stress is, starting with its history.
Stressed is a term used by virtually every American adult to describe themselves at some point in their lives, but what does that really mean? What symptoms or sensations are they experiencing that give them the feeling of being stressed? Our ability (or inability) to cope with external circumstances manifests as a set of physical changes that are rooted in our primal survival instincts—which we so rarely have cause to activate in modern life—that tell us that we are in danger. The sympathetic nervous system, also known as the “fight-or-flight” mechanism, becomes overactive, and our bodies respond by creating changes in chemistry to help us survive the perceived threat, as if we were cave people running from a saber-toothed tiger. Therapeutic massage, however, can often help counteract that process in a pleasant, safe, and completely natural way. During a relaxation massage, the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the “rest-and-digest” mechanism, is activated and begins to reverse the biochemical processes in the body that were begun by the sympathetic nervous system. In this course, we will examine what happens to the
SECTION 1: WHAT IS STRESS?
physical and emotional stimuli (blaring light, deafening noise, extremes of heat or cold, perpetual frustration) all exhibited the same pathologic changes of stomach ulcerations, shrinkage of lymphoid tissue and enlargement of the adrenals. He later demonstrated that persistent stress could cause these animals to develop various diseases similar to those seen in humans, such as heart attacks, stroke, kidney disease and rheumatoid arthritis. At the time, it was believed that most diseases were caused by specific but different pathogens...What Selye proposed was just the opposite, namely that many different insults could cause the same disease, not only in animals, but in humans as well” (American Institute of Stress, 2018). This was a groundbreaking hypothesis at the time, and it led to a lifetime of research for Selye, who continues to be credited with coining the term stress. When asked to provide a more succinct definition of stress, he would eventually submit that “Everyone knows what stress is, but nobody really knows.”
In 1936, Hans Seyle, a Hungarian endocrinologist and researcher, first coined the term stress to describe a condition affecting the human body. He defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.” That does not seem so negative at first glance, especially when presented in matter-of-fact scientific language, but we know from experience that what we have come to understand as stress can be a negative, weighty thing. Selye understood that, too, and his definition proved to be too simplistic because the observable effects of the stress phenomenon were far too complex to define in simple terms. Selye was also studying the endocrine system, which itself is a rather complex governing force in the body that uses hormones to regulate functions. The American Institute of Stress describes Selye’s research, discoveries, and theories in an article on the institute’s website titled “What Is Stress?” “Selye had noted in numerous experiments that laboratory animals subjected to acute but different noxious
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Book Code: MNJ0626
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