Steps Toward Massage Therapy Guidelines: A First Report to the Profession

In establishing an evidence-based consideration of massage relative to health care, multiple challenges must be dealt with. Among them are the diversity of massage techniques, philosophies, and contexts, and the evidence base itself. In the United States at least, not all that falls under a regulatory context of massage can be assumed to be health care system–related; a broad and diverse range of services can appropriately be considered client facilitation or client-directed somatic/sensory exploration. As part of a general set of health care system definitions, the construction of massage regulation in the United States has been based on a “wide-net” paradigm of touch practices rather than on an outcome competency paradigm. Addressing this situation, Rosen(28) recently commented on the need for a more compactly defined knowledge and competency base for health care system inclusion.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3091445/