It has been inspiring to watch the exponential growth of our field over the last 20 or so years. In that time we have seen a host of excellent textbooks published. We have been witness to the emergence of a peer-reviewed science journal devoted to soft-tissue therapy that is now indexed on Medline, the world’s largest medical literature database. There is also an increasing awareness and interest in massage by traditional health care professionals.
I experienced this increased interest first hand several years ago as scores of administrators and educators from the nation’s medical schools gathered at Georgetown Medical School with a group of educators from the complementary and alternative health fields during the National Education Dialogue (NED). One goal of that gathering was to discuss the future of medical education and how it could include greater representation from these CAM perspectives.
Judging from these advances it would be easy to suggest that the massage therapy field is growing, maturing, and the skills and abilities of its practitioners are advancing. There is no question that the number of people in the field has increased dramatically during that time. However, although certain individuals have gone very far, I don’t believe there has been a corresponding growth in the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) of the average practitioner. In fact, I think we have actually been witness to a decline in the quality of KSAs that the average professional displays.
While there is no hard data to back up these perceptions, I have been paying close attention to this for quite some time and talking to many different educators and leaders in the field about this trend. I noticed some years ago that as a continuing education provider, people were coming in to my workshops with less solid knowledge and poorer manual therapy skills. At first I wrote it off as just a widening gap between the advanced work I was studying and what the average practitioner would be likely to know. But then, I started making specific notes about what people seemed to know and be able to demonstrate with quality skills. It was clear that I could no longer rely on people having certain basic knowledge and understanding or being able to perform fundamental technical skills.
It pains me greatly to witness this decline in the quality of our field’s practitioners. But more important is looking at the reason for this decline and what can be done about it. I believe the reason for the decline is very clear. In the last decade and a half we have had a proliferation of schools and training programs to where it is somewhere near 1500 now.
A large number of training programs is not necessarily bad. However, there are nowhere near enough qualified massage therapy instructors to staff these training programs and consequently many programs are being taught by recent graduates or those that do not have seasoned skills, knowledge, or any significant instructor training. This is a massive problem and I don’t know what the immediate solution is, but it seems there is an urgency to look at some form of teacher credentialing or instructor training. What form should that teacher training or credentialing take? This is a discussion we must immediately engage because our future is at stake.
In New Zealand, it’s an industry expectation that any teaches have a minimum of 3-5 years clinical experience and that they have massage (or relevant) training at at least the level of the programme that they’re teaching on. This is not enforced, but I believe that in most educational institutions, these basic rules of thumb are observed.
By: davidmcquillan on March 26, 2009
at 9:07 pm
David:
Have you also seen a proliferation of schools during the last decade or two or has the growth been more gradual?
By: Whitney on March 27, 2009
at 10:17 am
A little hard for me to say for sure, because I’ve been involved in the massage education industry for only 4 years or so. However, I have had quite a bit to do with most of the other education providers over that time, so I feel that I have some kind of sense of what’s been happening.
We have 10-15 schools within NZ (sorry, I can’t remember the exact details). My impression is that perhaps half of those have sprung up over the last decade.
Over that same period, some of the industry leaders associated with the more established schools put a lot of work into developing government recognised industry standards for education. These have been fairly effective in terms of setting a baseline for education.
The industry expecation that I talked about before was a also a product of this process.
Of course there are some educational providers who sit outside of these standards, and there are some educational providers who are considered to produce lower quality graduates, but overall my impression is that most massage graduates have a reasonable understanding of applied anatomy, range of motion and postural analysis, and massage practice.
By: David McQuillan on March 27, 2009
at 1:34 pm