My state is starting to allow massage, and people are asking me about when I will teach in person classes again. Here is where I stand. I take this disease dead serious. And I take my responsibility as a healing arts practitioner, to help not harm, dead seriously. I need to see some mixture of the following before I will consider it safe to do bodywork or teach bodywork:
• Widespread reliable infection testing
• Widespread reliable antibody testing
• Understanding of how much immunity presence of antibodies indicates
• A reliable treatment/cure
• A reliable preventative (vaccine or other)
Other factors that I am keeping an eye on as I follow the science and data are:
• Country-wide infection numbers (my classes generally have students traveling from out of state, so it’s not just about Oregon)
• Herd immunity progression
• Covid-19 mutation (which may result in stronger or weaker viral spread depending)
Right now we have none of these things. To make decisions that could endanger lives with none of the factors that are needed to know that it is safe would be negligent.
Some thoughts about the push for massage therapists to work right now
• The novel coronavirus covid-19 is known to cause systemic circulatory issues including but not limited to formation of blood clots throughout the body. All licensed massage therapists have been trained that bodywork has the potential to dislodge blood clots, potentially causing brain embolism, pulmonary embolism, or cardio-embolism. Blood clots have been found in young, seemingly healthy or mildly sick covid-19 patients.
• Scientists and medics the world over are telling people to wear masks and stay at least 6 feet apart. Massage requires close physical contact for extended time. There is no way to practice social distancing and massage at the same time.
• The novel coronavirus covid-19 is aerosolized, meaning that the virus hangs and spreads in the air. The longer two or more people share air space, the more likely it is that if one person is infected, whether they know it or not, that the disease will spread to others in the room. Massage is most often done in small rooms with poor ventilation, for extended periods of time.
• I am following a number of social media groups in which massage therapists are talking about covid-19. Something that I am seeing over and over again is conversations about liability release forms. I’m seeing massage therapists who are eager to return to work, or who feel financially pressured to return to work, consulting with lawyers in order to iron clad their liability forms. Two thoughts about this: 1. there is no liability release form on earth that guarantees that you won’t get sued or be held accountable, and 2. If you are about to do something that you feel you need a legal firewall between yourself and responsibility for, that might right there be reason to pause and reconsider if what you are about to do is safe and ethical.
• I’ve seen conversations about having clients wait in the car rather than a waiting room, because the waiting room might not be safe. I’ve seen our governing board talk about clients bringing their own water bottles, because our glasses might not be safe, and then saying that the clients should leave the water bottle in their car, because their water bottles might not be safe. I’m not sure how we can say in one breath that the waiting rooms and water bottles are not safe, but that somehow our massage rooms and direct contact and shared air for between 30 and 90 minutes is magically okay.
• The push for massage to be open and for massage therapists to return to work has nothing to do with health care. It has nothing to do with worrying about client welfare. I have not seen one single massage therapist, in all of the social media groups, talk about clients who require massage in order to function. I’ve seen hundreds of massage therapists talk about needing money. And it’s my personal opinion that the states are allowing massage for money as well; because the more services they open up, the less they have to pay unemployment money.
• Around the country certain groups of people are being hit harder than anyone else by covid-19. This includes the elderly, people of color, native peoples, and the houseless. If you are white, relatively young, and have a roof over your head and don’t live in a hot spot, it is likely that you do not feel as threatened by this disease. If most of your community is white, well fed, and relatively young, it is likely that you have not lost anyone to this disease, or watched a friend suffer for two months through a bad case of it. It’s easy to start treating it lightly. But right now native peoples are, per capita experiencing numbers of covid cases higher than New York. And the risk of dying of covid in New York is greater than the risk of dying for soldiers in Afghanistan in 2010 (bad year in Afghanistan). If you want to be a white ally to people of color, and if you want to show up for our elders, then if you can (as in, you are not an emergency worker etc), you must stay home. You may be in a demographic that is less likely to suffer the worst of covid, but you share a world with demographics of people who are disproportionately likely to die from it.
• States that are allowing massage are requiring extensive PPE be used by both clients and therapists. If you have enough PPE to open your massage practice, then you have a moral obligation to give it to emergency medics who need it. If your local hospitals don’t need it, send it to a hospital in New York, or Chicago, or where ever the current hot spot is.
I don’t know if other massage teachers and schools will be opening up in person classes soon. I know that I miss my students. I know that I miss teaching. And I know that I’m going to choose safety over all else for as long as it takes. Maybe my classes will start in September as planned. Maybe they will be pushed back to January. Maybe I will be closed for two years. I don’t know. I just know that I love healing arts, and that as such, my decisions will be based in helping not harming. I have been doing massage for 30 years now. In that time there have been other times when I did something else for a spell. I know that time goes by quickly and that if I have to work a different job for awhile, I can do that. Massage will not go away. It will be here for me when it is safe for me to come back to it.
