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Treatment considerations, and oncology massage through the life cycle
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
ā¢A brief history of massage therapy in health care.
ā¢A brief history of the beginnings of oncology massage.
ā¢Introduction to the team/integrative approach to oncology care.
ā¢The definition and importance of evidence-based care.
ā¢Fitting into the health care team.
ā¢Principles for adapting massage therapy to treatment considerations: pressure, site, position, duration.
ā¢Introductory considerations for pediatric and geriatric oncology massage.
Massage in health care
Massage therapy has been practiced, in some form, all over the world for thousands of years. In the Western world, massage was long viewed as separate from biomedical practice. As an āalternativeā or ācomplementaryā practice, massage struggled at times to gain legitimacy among biomedical health care practitioners. In recent years, massage therapists have begun to codify the benefits of massage, and employ research as a tool to establish documentation of the results of massage therapy. In addition, recent and past research explores the question of when and how massage is a safe intervention, and how it can be used to treat certain symptoms or conditions.
As massage therapy becomes more integrated into health care, it becomes even more imperative for massage therapists to have a thorough understanding not only of their own work, but also of how that work fits into a personās overall health picture. The massage therapist who practices in isolation, with no contact or communication with other professionals, is becoming an antiquated notion.
This can only benefit the massage profession as we explore new professional collaborations and find ways to serve people who may not have experienced massage before. Our collaborations increase our knowledge of the human body, and of the ways in which health care professionals work. As the profession advances, our challenge becomes keeping our knowledge and skills in line with our opportunities. Basic massage training may not suffice for therapists who wish to work in a hospital or clinical setting, or for those who want to serve individuals whose medical history may be complex. With the increased acceptance of massage therapy in the medical field, the need for additional training grows. This is very apparent for massage therapists working with those who have a history of cancer treatment. As we will explore in Chapter 3, the incidence of cancer is so common that it is guaranteed that a therapist will encounter someone who has a cancer history in their career. The disease itself is complex, as is the treatment.
Although general clinical skills and critical thinking can take a therapist a long way toward creating the most safe and effective massage for each client, with a disease as complex as cancer, additional specialized knowledge is necessary. In this book, we seek to provide therapists with that specialized knowledge, along with a greater understanding of cancer and cancer treatment in an integrated context. We hope that therapists will understand that cancer is not a monolithic disease ā rather that it affects the body, mind, and spirit of each person differently.
History of oncology massage
Some therapists working today may remember a time when they were told that massage spreads cancer, and that people who are in cancer treatment should not receive massage of any kind. Fortunately, this belief is now almost completely extinct among health care professionals, having been invalidated by better understanding of how massage affects the body, as well as of how cancer starts and spreads.
The shift began, as most shifts do, with critical thinking. Massage therapists recognized parallels between standard biomedical practice for cancer patients and the impact of massage. For example, most cancer patients are advised to move and exercise within their tolerance limits throughout their treatment. As massage therapists recognized that massage alone would not cause an increase in systemic circulation anything like that which happens in a moving body (even a slowly or minimally moving body), they understood that massage could not spread cancer by increasing systemic circulation. (In Chapter 3, we will consider the question of massage and circulation in more detail.)
From this beginning, the understanding of cancer and cancer treatments as well as the understanding of massage itself, have grown exponentially. Through directed research and collaboration with other professionals, we have arrived now at a deeper and richer understanding of the application and potential of oncology massage.
