By the same token, most people who seek therapeutic massage are looking for a way to treat pain, but few physicians prescribe it as a much safer option to try first. We can speculate that perhaps this can be blamed on the tight hold the pharmaceutical industry has on the healthcare system in the U.S. There is less corporate profit to be made by recommending alternative and natural therapies to deal with pain. It is a constant uphill battle that we in the therapy professions face. The Cleveland Clinic defines caregiver burnout as “a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion that can happen when you dedicate time and energy to manage the health and safety of someone else. Caregivers who experience burnout may feel tired, stressed, withdrawn, anxious and depressed. Caregiver burnout can impact a person in various ways, including physically, psychologically, financially and socially” (Cleveland Clinic, 2023). Family caregivers can also experience isolation while providing care for a loved one at home, as life for them can revolve around the person needing care, sometimes making it necessary to neglect their own physical, emotional, and social needs. As we already know, stress can be the underlying cause of disease. It becomes a question of how long it will be before the caregiver becomes the one needing care. Therapeutic massage seems like an obvious choice to relieve the stress and fatigue caregivers experience. While caregiving, either as a profession or for a loved one, is considered noble, massage is still considered by many to be an indulgence. Many reports have come out since 2020 saying that the Covid-19 pandemic affected views on self- care globally. Perhaps it was the ability to step back from the momentum of our stressful lives during lockdown to feel how exhausted we all were going into the pandemic that shifted our priorities. Perhaps it was the pointed focus on staying safe and healthy while so many others were suffering and dying. Either way, we must do better about caring for our caregivers. As therapy professionals, it is up to us to elevate the therapy professions and the public perception of what we do. There is immense value in incorporating therapeutic massage into a healthcare maintenance routine, as we know. How can we make therapeutic massage as common as chiropractic care or traditional physical therapy exercise programs?
amount of pain that Americans report has not similarly changed. From 1999 to 2016, more than 200,000 people died in the United States from overdoses related to prescription opioids. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids were five times higher in 2016 than in 1999.” (CDC, 2017)
Caregiver burnout The physical and emotional toll of taking care of another person cannot be underestimated. We have seen a rise in the number of people assuming the caregiver role in recent years, due in large part to two primary factors: The havoc that Covid-19 brought upon the world, and the large population of aging baby boomers in the U.S. The demand for caregivers, both professionally in the healthcare system and privately within families, has grown. Shortages in hospital and long-term care staff continue to be a problem nationwide, especially since the pandemic. Long hours, high demands, and poor pay were always to blame, and then the pandemic increased concerns about workplace safety to new heights. In 2022, the American Nurses Foundation released the results of their Covid-19 Two-Year Impact Assessment Survey, which showed that 60% of acute care nurses reported feeling burned out, and 75% reported feeling stressed, frustrated, and exhausted (American Nurses Foundation, 2022). While the number of working nurses is getting smaller, the number of unpaid family caregivers is growing. In 2020, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) estimated that “more than one in five Americans (21.3 percent) are caregivers, having provided care to an adult or child with special needs at some time in the past 12 months. This totals an estimated 53.0 million adults in the United States, up from the estimated 43.5 million caregivers in 2015” (AARP, 2020), and that number has likely grown in the past four years. Family caregivers are usually acting as such while also working at their paying jobs. For many, it puts a severe strain on their work–life balance (as discussed previously). What happens when those caregivers are not giving enough care to themselves?
SECTION 3: HOW CAN THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE HELP?
massage for those who have not yet discovered its role as part of an integrated self-care plan. When you provide that “Ahhhhhhhh...” feeling to your clients, it can be easy to take the power of our skills for granted and forget about the tremendous impact we can have on our patients. In the following section of this course, we will discuss this potential impact as well as some do’s and don’t’s to maintain our professionalism in these situations. rest-and-digest response, triggering the opposite actions in the body as the sympathetic nervous system and its fight-or- flight response. When the parasympathetic nervous system kicks into gear, the body conserves energy by slowing down the heart rate, and the intestinal tract is relaxed and allowed to function optimally. These changes also affect the brain by altering hormone and neurotransmitter levels in the body. “The relaxation response is a state in which your heart and breathing rate slow, your blood pressure goes down, your production of stress hormones decreases, and
Therapeutic massage can often lead to patients leaving a session with a blissful feeling, especially in a traditional massage setting. However, all soft tissue work does not feel blissful to patients, or even comfortable depending on the approach. Sometimes, soft tissue work can be painful, especially if the patient is tense, stiff or experiencing trigger points/muscle spasms. It is important for us to remember that differentiation as we welcome new clients into our practices and continue to be the voice of therapeutic What happens to the body and brain during massage Getting a traditional massage often feels good, but why? What exactly happens in the body and brain to give us that feeling? Just as there is the stress response discussed previously in this course, there is also a relaxation response that can take place in the body during a massage. The relaxation response is the combination of neurological, biochemical, and physiological changes that occur when the parasympathetic nervous system takes over to create that “Ahhhhhhhh...” feeling. The parasympathetic nervous system engineers the relaxation response, also known as the
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Book Code: MNJ0626
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