Get This Book and Wonder.....

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...WHY, WHY, WHY are we not taught this in school?
Canadians are. Canadians are way ahead of the game massage education wise, which I've wondered about a lot. Maybe it's because they've got better beer there or something. Maybe it's because our big political bodies here in the US have been at each others throats so much. Who knows?

Anyway, we're not taught research literacy in our massage schools and we should be. There's a reason for this. When we think about taking on new modalities it's very easy to find all sorts of claims on the internet and in books and magazines which are presented in the form of research. The only problem is I never knew the difference between a Systematic Review and a Quasi-Experimental Study or other types of studies. Turns out this type of information is pretty important. I mean, really important. I'm saying pretty dang amazingly mind-blowingly important.

Educate yourself and then research the research. Quiz your teachers too. There's a good chance they don't know this stuff either. They should. Everyone should.

"FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN. LEND ME YOUR EARS....!!!"

Those Guys at Google are SMART.........

Not only because they built the most popular search engine on the Internet, but in building and maintaining it, they realized the importance of massage in the workplace and have a massage therapist work on their engineers. Not only do they do this present day, but they realized the importance of it early on and the result was a massage therapist that later became a multi-millionaire.

Bonnie Brown, a massage therapist, was partly paid in stock options at Google. She started working there when it was just a small company and ended up a rich woman when the company IPO'd in 2004.

I love this story. Not only because just the thought of a member of our profession made it big by doing what we (and she) love, but there's the fact that she now spends her time as a philanthropist, helping others. That is so "massage therapisty"! Since I'm an ex-she geek and worked for 2 start up companies as a software engineer (both companies ended up in the proverbial toilet) I loved to hear the story of a company that made it. Her book was interesting - laugh out loud funny in a few spots, especially her "hot mussels" story on page 112. I think any massage therapist would enjoy this book not only for relating to what goes on in the head of another massage therapist, but for the entertainment value. It made me think that I would like to have a pint and a natter with Bonnie sometime, just to hear more of her entertaining stories.



Gaelic lesson #28 "Ta si lofa le hairgead", pronounced "Ta she low-va le hergad", meaning "She is stinking rich"