The New Found Role of Hands-On Therapy within the Modern Health System - Part 1
A shoeless man dancing to the chants and drums of ancient words… mumbling, gesturing… strange, mysterious, outdated… an occasionally endearing, frequently scary and questionably unhinged character. The current image of the Shaman is that of an eccentric character stuck in a past reality of magic healing, potions and spirits.
It all started on a sunny day, 10,000 years ago, in one of the first civilisations of our kind, settled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, men and women of power belonging to the priestly class, keepers of knowledge, meeting to discuss current affairs. These individuals are both priests and physicians of their time and they’re responsible mainly for both the spiritual and physical health of the community. Their healing practices are very much interconnected with religious believes and rituals. Wait, did you say priest-physician women? Yes, women. This is early days so society hadn’t yet used religion to establish gender disparity.
The Shaman was the person people would go to for help when they were ill, our first human civilisation’s “doctor”, the beginning of pretty much all consequent healing arts in human history.
Even though written word didn’t emerge until around 5000 years ago and therefore we do not have any written reference to massage in these earliest civilisations, Archeological findings suggest that massage, the basis of the use of our hands with healing intentions, has always been around and even though humans have referred to it by different names throughout history and the word has implied different things (still does today!) one must be inclined to think that we have used our hands with healing intention from the moment we first stepped foot on Earth.
It’s important to note that at the beginning healing arts (and therefore massage) were interconnected with religion and spirituality (which were also the same unit) in shamanic practices. The first written records of healing practice show a combination of clinical notes and prescriptions along with spells and exorcisms. Common among their prescriptions were herbs and spices, massage, plasters and baths amongst others.
From then onwards, healing arts would evolve simultaneously along with civilisations in different forms around the globe realising into different practices and swaying away from its ritualised shamanic nature in most cases. We can see the result of this evolution today in the form of different types of non-invasive hands on healing therapy (India — Ayurveda, one of the most ancient form of natural medicine still widely practiced today, included massage as a prescribed treatment tool and still does now a days;
Ayurveda massage
China — developing Acupressure and more recently acupuncture, Tui Na, Nei Kung Tui Na —where the therapist trained in Nei Kung channels Qi to the patient, all still widely used today;
Acupressure
Hawaii and its popular Lomi lomi massage or the more recent and widely spread western originated Deep tissue and Swedish to mention a few).
Amongst all events, there is a key time in history that would globally affect the healing arts and plant the seed for modern medicine to develop, affecting as well the evolution of hands on healing, the Helenic period in Greece, more than 2000 years ago.
A greek physician and philosopher called Hippocrates once believed that all illness had a rational cause. This concept revolutionised the healing arts, shifting the definition of the physician away from that of the shaman, the religion, rituals and the exorcisms, to that of logic, observation and rational thought, principle of diagnosis and prescribed treatment. The duo Religion/spirituality and healing are no longer linked. Hippocrates created the first known school dedicated to teaching the practice of holistic medicine, establishing medicine as a profession and crowning himself as “the father of medicine”.
Although very little is known about what Hippocrates actually thought, wrote or did, medical historian Dr Graham writes in the early 90s about a text attributed to Hippocrates “The physician (what we call doctor) must be experienced in many things, but assuredly also in rubbing” (what he called Anatripsis, his own word referring to massage). This implies that he considers massage as part of prescribed treatment for illness. Graham also finds reference text of Hippocrates redefining massage techniques, which makes us believe that he went deeper into thought and the study of hands-on techniques with *medical intentions.
The natural evolution of massage through history goes hand in hand with the evolution of the way humans perceived themselves (spirituality/religion) how they perceived health and healing (science) and how they perceived one another (social). This means that massage (or its equivalent word used at the time and place) has played different roles in society, it has meant not only different practices but has had different meanings and intentions too, still to this very day.
How did our civilisation jump from the healing arts of that of the shaman to those of our current system? Science, of course… Hippocrates shifted the paradigm from suspicion to observation of the human body laying the foundations and advances in science followed along, affecting and determining of course as well the direction in evolution of hands on healing and massage.
Until very recently though science hadn’t advanced enough for us to understand the important role of hands-on therapy. We were stuck in a simplistic understanding of the functioning of the human body that seemed to leave hands-on therapy without a lead role in the modern healing system.
Different advances in science in the past 60 years would cause a 360 perspective shift in the way we were looking at the human body and the musculoskeletal system. Under this new light hands-on therapy has a lot to offer us and we can finally understand why with scientific evidence.
The scientific discovery that changed the way we look and treat our body
The Fascia or Myofascial tissue has revolutionised the way we look at the body in the past couple of decades.
The Myofascial tissue is a connective tissue in our body, a spider web-like tissue, a single piece of fabric that it’s found in the body in different compositions and in different levels.
This tissue allows the transmission of force generated by the muscles through the whole system allowing the muscles to work together as a unit rather than as isolated individual entities.
We’ve always known that the fascial existed, what we didn’t know it’s how important its role is within our body. The old model in which our health system and all the professions within it still needs to be updated to accommodate these new findings.
It’s in the dissection room where we get a chance to study the body in detail. We’ve been doing this for a long time but we missed something!
We were cutting through the fascia to isolate and study the muscles (which we thought were the important ones). The body was cut and studied in isolated pieces and in such way we missed the global view of the body, which works in fact as a unit.
The fascia is one of the most fascinating fields of study in science as we try to understand its role fully.
What we do know already is that it’s an extremely sensitive organ, it has more sensory receptors than the skin itself. We also know that it reacts and adapts to pressure changes within our body and to chemical changes within the environment in which it lives, which makes it sensitive to psychological stress.
This is in itself a paradigm shift in the way we look at the body now.
References:
The History of Massage: An Illustrated Survey from Around the World, Robert Noah Calvert, 2002