Industry Experts Look Back
© Massage & Bodywork magazine, October/November 2007

It may have been a bumpy ride at times during the last twenty years, but the massage profession has persevered and is now nearly two hundred fifty thousand therapists strong. Thanks to the hard work of those who came before, and the continued blood, sweat, and tears of practitioners nationwide, bodywork benefits thousands of bodies each day. From growing consumer acceptance to medical integration, it’s come a long way.

That’s why in addition to what you’ve already read in Karrie Osborn’s article, “Now and Then,” we invite you to peruse the following industry experts’ comments on the last twenty years. We queried these nine insiders about their experiences, and their responses offer wonderful perspectives from various branches of the bodywork tree. We hope you’ll enjoy these insights on the growth and maturation of our beloved profession.

—Darren Buford
Managing Editor

David Lauterstein
I began as a teacher in 1982 at the Chicago School of Massage Therapy. From 1984-1989, I was head of faculty at the Texas School of Massage Studies in Austin. Then in 1989, I cofounded The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School in Austin with John Conway. We’re now in our nineteenth year. I have taught workshops additionally all across the United States since 1982 and in England since 1996.

When I started teaching, there seemed to be two educational contexts. First was the old Swedish massage teaching/school model that was often homespun education—Mom and Pop—without much anatomy. Generally, however, there was solid hands-on transmission of Swedish massage, with, depending on the teacher, various folk remedies, wisdom, and some quackery thrown in. It was very much an oral/manual tradition with teachers teaching it their unique way. There were only two textbooks—Marc Beck’s Theory and Practice of Therapeutic Massage and Ruth Williams’ The Road to Radiant Health, and most schools didn’t even use those. Many schools advertised they offered one thousand hours. However, they counted homework as class hours in many cases. So the American Massage Therapy Association spearheaded a quality control measure of requiring five hundred hours, but for these to be documented, in-class hours.

Then, began the new wave of massage/bodyworkers and schools. This happened with the influx of “’60s” people into the profession. Many of the best and brightest started teaching or started their own schools by the late ‘70s: myself, Margaret Avery, Ben Benjamin, Heide Brenneke, Iris Burman, Rosalee Foster, Nancy Dail, Jim Hackett, Steve Kitts, Bob King, Jackson and Sally Niemand Petersberg, Jerry Toporovsky, and many others.

Virtually no one would have talked about the massage school “industry” at that time. It would have been seen as a reactionary and overly commercial way of describing something that to many was a sacred calling, an art, and a science of optimizing human potential.

Now of course our resources have multiplied vastly. The textbooks relating to massage are in the hundreds and now they are published largely by medical textbook publishers. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was more the alternative press/alternative lifestyle publishers who produced books on massage.

Overall, the quality of education, especially in the sciences, has increased. This seemed to begin in the mid-80s, as sports massage—with stimulus from Jack Meagher, Benny Vaughn, and Bob King—took off. Similarly, the clinical aspects of bodywork have developed greatly, initially with stimulus from Ben Benjamin, Paul St. John, and Leon Chaitow. And the energetic side of bodywork took some big leaps forward with John Upledger, Fritz Smith, and the many teachers of Asian bodywork.

With growth there are gains and losses. We have gained in medical recognition and the medical expertise of most massage education. We have gained in mainstream acceptance and a wider base of people from whom we draw our students and future therapists.

The loss is the industrialization and corporatizing of massage education. Recently, many of the people I mentioned above have sold out to a large corporation. It was virtually impossible fifteen years ago to find any massage school owner who was not originally a massage therapist. Now quite possibly the majority of school owners are business people with little if any background in massage. There is no doubt this will take some of the personal nature out of massage education. Many of the most visionary older teachers have retired or are on the verge of it. Thankfully, there are many young visionaries, though perhaps fewer high-level schools for them to teach in.

The energy side and artistic side of massage and bodywork continues to receive less attention in massage schools and in national examinations. Therefore, the holistic (which ideally includes but goes beyond the just medical) is being superceded by the merely medical. Ironically, many of the medical people who get into massage are going in the opposite direction. They’ve been there, done that, and seen the limits of the often impersonal, allopathic treatment model.

In sum, the news is overall good. However, it continues to be a “growing edge” that the profession as a whole has not confronted the issue of how the art, as well as the science, is to be transmitted. Ironically, I asked my wife, a massage therapist for twenty years, what changes she had seen. And she said, “Massage school is harder.”

Lastly I should say, as a school owner, there is more competition and it is harder for the smaller, more visionary schools to thrive. However, it seems we are overall still growing and learning—let us have the highest hopes for the future.

Personally and professionally, I again feel it is critical that the profession not lose its soul as we become more mainstream. I hope to see serious attention paid to the continued evolution of the art, as well as the science of massage and bodywork.

Gayle MacDonald
As I thought back over the last twenty years in the massage field, tallying the gains and losses, I felt in danger of sounding like some old fogy who boasted that she had to walk five miles to school in the snow, had no electricity, and put cardboard in the bottom of her shoes when a hole wore through. I’m startling to realize that twenty years ago some of today’s students and therapists had only just been born. How can this be? It feels as if I just started my massage career. The twenty years have passed so quickly and my work as a massage therapist still feels new and fresh.

Twenty years ago massage was a mid-life career change for many people. Our classes were predominately filled with what would now be referred to as “mature” students. These people had worked in other professions, bringing with them job skills honed in other arenas.

My first day in massage class the instructor victoriously explained that the Oregon massage community had just won a battle with the telephone company disallowing prostitutes and escort services from being listed in the phone book under Massage Therapy. Gratefully, that battle is fought less often.

When we finished school, there was a lot of uncertainty about our futures. Seldom was there such a thing as a massage job. It was years before I remember seeing a massage position being listed in the newspaper employment section. You had to be a self-starter. Many a person with great hands and technique left the profession before they even started because they did not have the temperament to create their own business. Now, with the phenomenal increase in spas and wellness centers, there are places for therapists to earn a living straight out of school.

People sometimes laughed at me when I told them I was a massage therapist. Now massage shows up in the top ten lists of hot careers. Success, however, also creates tension. Twenty years ago massage existed on the fringes. It was just beginning to bud out. Many therapists then were driven by a desire to enter the mainstream. And now we are there. The profession is branching out in many directions, flowering, and bearing fruit. This brings complexity. We struggle to define ourselves, to create a common knowledge base among the various practitioners, to be financially stable personally and professionally. 

A historical perspective of massage helps me when I feel overwhelmed with the changes, some of which are discouraging. Massage has always been with us in some form. It has waxed and waned for thousands of years. It is not a new phenomenon. Just now, a new chapter is being written. The ending remains to be seen.

However, our roots are always there to bring us back to common ground, to center us. For me, that common ground is the use of skilled, systematic touch as a way to find communion for body, mind, and heart. No matter whether the bodywork session is in a hospital, nail salon, or wellness center, or whether the practitioner is using reiki, Swedish, or Zero Balancing, connection is happening at every level—within each person, between persons, and among mankind. This has special significance in this day and age and must not be forgotten as we branch out in so many different directions.

J. Paul De Vierville
My personal perspective and reflection comes from the comparable growth, public acceptance, and widespread expansion for the spa industry and its related professions (as identified frequently as spa experiences, spa lifestyles, and the world of spa cultures), in which professional massage and bodywork are central.

Spas have been around for a long time, so twenty years (1987-2007) is a short period of history, but still significant because this was a time between two millennia, with a noticeable period of rapid growth and speedy development—some good, some not so good.

In fact, it is this very vector of time that is key to the basic regenerative capacities of great spas in their successful and sustainable efforts to integrate and use nature’s rhythms and elements like those found in the water (baths), air (exercise), earth (mud and algae wraps), and light/heat (sauna), along with those essential to healthy foods, nutrition, herbs, and cultural imagination.

A quick look at the numbers (as quantities) reveals there are a lot more spas since 1987; double-digit growth has been the rule, not the exception. But, rapid expansive growth in terms of more and larger is not necessarily better.

When we look at the numbers (as quality), an interesting feature is revealed in the evolutionary time line or quantum pulse of spa.

In their efforts to reach ecological sustainability, spas are moving along a pathway that is more like a cycle and spiral—some moving up, others moving down, some going back and returning, others coming up and moving inward.

Over the past twenty years, and more so in the last five, an interesting internal phenomenon is happening to spa culture, especially in the United States. Spas are not going forward in time, but rather backward—there is a returning to roots with a search for the organics and sustainable growth patterns and development. Spas are looking backward to see their future. Growth and development appear to be within, through, and around a returning to the origins. Sustainable spas are doing so by sticking to graceful simplicity—in other words, back to basics.

Spas are less new fangled and high technologies, but more wise and well-tested treatments. Massage and bodywork are related and connected directly with spa culture like the primordial elements of earth, water, air, fire, and ether.

By going back and returning, one goes deeper and reaches originality and authenticity. Deeper ecological interests, relationships, and purpose bring forth social and value issues, and it is these sustainability concerns that the International Spa Association (ISPA) and the newly established and eco-active Green Spa Network (GSN) are addressing.

Now, after twenty years, there appears to be more access and availability for people to participate in spa culture as a healthful and sustainable way of life.

Nina McIntosh
Ethics and professional boundaries themselves haven’t changed since 1987: having sexual relationships with clients was unethical then and it still is. Careless boundaries, such as chatting on about yourself during a session, was a bad idea then and it still is. The difference is that we didn’t pay much attention to those standards twenty years ago. We just didn’t know any better. Of course, individual massage therapists acted professionally, but overall, there wasn’t the general consciousness that there is today of the need for solid ethics and sensitive boundaries in our relationships with clients. In the late 1980s, most of us received little, if any, guidance in school, and learned from role models who themselves hadn’t been trained in that area.

However, over the past twenty years, that consciousness has grown. As the profession matured during the 1990s, we gradually became aware that something was missing, that success in this intimate work required more than knowledge of anatomy or technique. Looking back, the need to help our clients feel safe seems obvious. After all, we were crossing cultural boundaries, touching naked strangers, and often working outside of the legitimatizing environment of a medical office. Add to that the fact that we were (and still are) laboring under the public misconception that massage is equal to sexual services. Moreover, we became increasingly aware of the vulnerability of the client—for instance, that they often look up to us and grant us extra authority.

During the 1990s, more schools began expanding their ethics and boundaries courses to include the finer points of such subjects as confidentiality, scope of practice, dual relationships, and sexual ethics. Ben Benjamin, PhD, was a pioneer in presenting the case for good boundaries and discussing issues concerning clients with a history of having been sexually or physically abused. Ethics teachers, such as Dianne Polseno, began writing about and teaching workshops on ethics.

As with other subjects, the publications on ethics have greatly expanded in the last ten years or so. My book, The Educated Heart, was the first textbook for massage therapists and bodyworkers on ethics and boundaries. Since its publication in 1999, it has been joined by at least two others—The Ethics of Touch by Ben E. Benjamin and Cherie Sohnen-Moe and Ethics for Massage Therapists by Terri Yardley-Nohr.

As massage becomes increasingly more mainstream, it’s impossible to know what will happen to the profession’s awareness of the need for sound ethics and boundaries. State licensing and national certification processes requiring continuing education in ethics have become more prolific in the last twenty years. Although an imperfect system, such regulations at least bring awareness to the subject. 

The overall consciousness of the need for professional ethics and boundaries has grown, but could be in danger of being trivialized or buried in the current explosion of schools offering training in massage. Since basic school training is the most crucial time to learn professional ethics and boundaries, much depends on schools’ commitment to comprehensive education that prepares students for genuine success in this field.

The popularity of massage has been a boon to the profession but has also caused an unhappy trend. Some outside the field who have little or no knowledge of the daily challenges of this intimate work are offering massage trainings in vocational schools or taking over existing massage schools and scaling down their programs, returning to the outdated idea that courses in anatomy and technique are enough to turn a student into a solid professional massage therapist.

It’s my hope that all school administrators will realize that success in this field—whether in a medical setting, spa, or private practice—depends on therapists’ ability to create safe, professional relationships with clients. I hope that educators will learn that preparing students adequately not only enhances the reputation of the profession, but also the reputation (and financial success) of the school.

This profession is shooting off in all directions and changing in ways that are both worrisome and exciting. Basic questions of our identity have yet to be resolved. For instance, the recent coining of the phrase “the massage industry” raises the question of whether we’re an industry or a profession or somehow both.

In the next twenty years, the current growth spurt will probably level off and a new stability will take form in ways that can’t be predicted. Whatever the future holds, it’s my hope that the teaching and practice of ethics and professional boundaries will be recognized as the bedrock of our continuing success.

Ruth Werner
I’ll say it loud and proud: in 1984 I went to massage school mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I was twenty-three, and I couldn’t find paying work in my chosen field (theater). And I had to find a way to make a living, preferably a way that did not involve restaurants or computers.

In those days (I am fond of saying, in a creaky voice and leaning on an invisible cane, “Waaay back when I was in massage school . . . ”) the program was about four months long, and we met twice or three times a week in the evening and on some weekends. We met in various classrooms—wherever we could find space. My first transcript claims a whopping one hundred twenty-five hours of instruction. 

In those days the school owner, or the owner and his or her acolytes, taught everything, from anatomy to business practices (if such a thing was even taught!), and each school was consequently completely unique to itself. Hands-on skills were carefully honed in small classes with great attention to the fundamental disciplines of learning technique. Graduates of these programs would develop a style of bodywork that was distinctive to that school, and the range of modalities was typically limited to Swedish with maybe some deep tissue or a smattering of reflexology or energy work thrown in.

What a different world we live in today! Nowadays massage programs last several months and hundreds of hours. Costs easily rise above $10,000, and many students rely on student loans to help pay tuition. The days of the massage school in someone’s basement with intensive training under one teacher/owner are mostly over.

Is this a good thing? A bad thing? It doesn’t matter; it’s a simple truth that carries pluses and minuses. A lot of us “old timers” could probably compile a long list of problems with the current massage education picture without too much trouble: large programs can’t or don’t choose students carefully; students are less personally invested in their education because federal loans make it seem too “easy”; students are lured by commercials promising short programs and high incomes; new graduates are not as thoroughly educated in traditional techniques as we were; and some schools have become homogenized factories, lacking individuality and personality. These are a few things on my short list of complaints.

These problems are significant, but they are not the whole picture. Some amazing, miraculous, undeniably positive things have developed in massage education; these promote the whole profession and benefit everyone who calls themselves a massage therapist.

• Massage education is more well rounded than it used to be. New graduates today have multiple tools in their tool belts. Instead of being limited to Swedish and deep tissue (like me), they have alternatives in shiatsu, polarity, and other non-circulatory techniques that make their work safe and appropriate for a wider variety of clients.
• A bigger group of students means more materials are developed. I remember the days when there were no books written for massage therapists. We used premed or medical school texts for anatomy and physical therapy texts for kinesiology, and created our own documents for everything else. Now we can find high-quality texts aimed specifically for our students in every aspect of massage education.
• Student clinics, while fraught with difficulties, have made getting a massage more acceptable to many people who would otherwise never consider it. We could say a lot about other ways student clinics influence massage education and the massage market, but it is undeniable that the well-advertised, cost-effective student clinic experience has opened the public’s mind to this important healthcare modality.
• Corporate schools provide an infrastructure to raise the bar for education for all new therapists. Again, this issue is loaded with positive and negative possibilities, but among the positive ones are the advantages offered by size: large schools with many campuses influence many students. They can use that opportunity to improve the educational standard in ways that will affect the entire community.
• More practitioners with formal training open doors for more research, more credibility in the healthcare community, and more venues for massage to reach the public.
• And finally, the real kicker: more people get massage now than ever before. This is inarguably true and inarguably positive.

Sandy Fritz
As I review my resume, which provides an outline of my career, I can recall the evolution of massage over the last three decades. I am originally self taught with augmentation from classes with many gifted teachers, such as Irene Gauthier, John Barnes, Leon Chaitow, and so many others. The early years of massage education were fragmented, varied, opinion- and experience-based, and overall very exciting—even if not always valid. Therapeutic massage and related methods were a natural evolution for many of us who grew up in the 1960s. I was there for the first sports massage exam sponsored by the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA), and Jack Meagher was my examiner. My AMTA membership number is 1094, which means there were that many members in the AMTA. I watched and participated in the growing pains of our profession. In 1985, I opened Health Enrichment Center in Michigan. We just celebrated our twenty-first anniversary and are holding our own in a state where massage school offerings have increased from three, twenty years ago, to close to fifty, with most of that growth occurring in the last five years.

Commitment to quality education over the twenty-one years has meant that the school has had to evaluate, adjust, and embrace many new concepts and procedures, such as accreditation and standardized core curriculum content that may or may not have fit with my personal belief, irritated many of my instructors, and challenged value systems for therapeutic massage across the country.

Inevitably, the profession became more sophisticated, resulting in standardized, examination and accreditation. All of this activity initially was distressing to me because I came from the free-spirited 1960s, and I knew I would have to conform at some level to remain current with professional development. In the midst of my own professional turmoil,  Mosby (now Elsevier) publishing approached me to write a textbook for massage education. This came as the result of me pressuring my sales representative from Mosby to publish a textbook for massage schools (but not me writing it). Ultimately, after much resistance and a lot or persuasion and support (I have dyslexia), I agreed to write an entry-level textbook for massage. The text was released in 1995 with mixed acceptance. While impressions and feedback were that the content was valid, the concern was that massage application could not be adequately presented in a way that respected the art form and uniqueness of massage in a textbook. I agreed with these observations but realized that as a profession, if we were going to test ourselves, such as with the National Certification Exam, we needed to capture the body of knowledge in such a way that fundamentals would be consistently presented. Research findings and the need for agreement on terminology has changed not so much what we do as massage therapists but the understanding of why massage provided benefit. It was a real challenge to present factual data, justify its validly, and remain generic while consistently editing and letting others edit my own personal style from the textbook.

The resulting textbook is now in its third edition and soon fourth edition and is the most widely used textbook in the world for therapeutic massage education. Shortly after, a science text specifically for massage education was developed and has been successful. Currently, Elsevier is developing the career development series covering the three main tracts for massage specialization after entry-level education, and I have been privileged to write two of the main texts that cover sports, fitness, and healthcare.

The amount of commitment the major publishers have put into massage-related educational materials is an accurate representation of the growth of the profession. Previous to 1995, only one mainstream publisher offered a textbook in massage. Since 1995 many publishers offer textbook and resource material. Since it is very expensive to produce quality textbooks, publishers would not invest in this industry if they did not see the potential for growth.

Even though educational resources are increasing, availability of credentialed and experienced educators is one of the main problems the profession is experiencing and is compounded by the expansive growth of the massage education industry. More than ten years ago, I realized that I would have to complete a bachelor’s and master’s degree from traditional colleges and universities in order to both support expertise as a textbook writer and as a massage therapy educator. Initially, I was irritated by having to spend the money and time to complete these degrees, but in retrospect the process was very beneficial. That educational journey reinforced for me that we must embrace change and guide it to maintain the integrity of the soul of our profession.

Susan G. Salvo
Happy Birthday, ABMP! When you first arrived on the massage scene, I was president of the Louisiana chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA). Back then, your presence was talked about at meetings and conferences, but no one gave you much notice. A score (twenty years) ago, you were a blip on a screen. Wow, you’ve come a long way since then. Thank you for being so dedicated to the profession and to the members you serve. And thank you for this opportunity to reminisce.  

When I look back over the last twenty years, what strikes me the most? It’s how the focus of the actual massage has changed. It is less of a rubdown and more of a customized or tailored session.

How did we get here from there? It’s a combination of things, of course. Most likely the supply and demand theory. I have often wondered where the impetus came from; why did massage programs change what they taught and how it was taught?

I began to change our massage program (Louisiana Institute of Massage Health Studies) when, as a therapist, I was frequently confronted with situations for which I needed a better background. Clients expected more from me, and I needed to rise to the occasion.

I attended college to fill the knowledge holes, taking biology, nursing, psychology, even business courses. The more knowledge I gained, the more excited I got about massage. It was from that passion that I began teaching a more massage-friendly anatomy/physiology course. When I taught massage, it was sprinkled with anatomy. Students not only loved it, but their clients were getting better service and rewarding them with continued patronage.

Now, therapists are taught how to screen clients for contraindications and how to address specific conditions such as pregnancy, diabetes, or osteoporosis, just to name a few.

Therapists can address specific trigger or tender points, recognize pain referral patterns, and avoid suspect areas. The therapist nowadays asks more questions and is more specific with strokes, translating into a more effective massage.

Massage has had a fantastic twenty years. The next twenty will be even more phenomenal.

Thomas Myers
In the course of professional development, the motivations for dumbing down any healing art are many, and the sources for lifting the standard higher are sadly few. Greed for money and numbers, expediency in education, and the rush for the lowest common denominator in legislation and certification are strong forces for slippage. In contrast, there is really only one counterweight on the other side of the balance beam: inspired people.

In the thirty years since the heady days of discovery in the early 1970s, we have seen all three of these nasties at work within the massage and bodywork profession, sometimes leading toward despair for loss of potential we all know is there. The joy, however, is the actions of individual people have outweighed both inertia and venality, and despite these forces our profession is in fact being lifted to new heights of variation, application, and sophistication.

Hats off to the folks—too numerous to name—who, through their writing, their example, their innovation, and their plain hard work have made manual therapy more widely available to the public and more widely recognized as a valid form of medical therapy and education. Gratitude to all—from the wild and stubborn pioneers who first broke ground with the original approaches, to the teachers who interpret and codify their insights, to the quiet workers behind the scenes who do the tedious but necessary education of the uninformed. I am particularly mindful of those editors like Leslie Young, Karen Menehan, and Leon Chaitow who sit in the center and work so tirelessly to canvass and organize this immature and restless field, bringing new ideas forward and finding the underlying common principles.

During the last twenty years, we have seen our endeavors become more grounded in research, and we have learned a great deal about each other: how much joins the various manual arts, and yet how variable the alphabet soup of current therapies can be. Alexander, Bowen, and cranial all the way to yoga and Zero Balancing—what a rich field of play!

In my own field of structural integration (SI), during the last twenty-eight years since Ida Rolf’s death, the profession has expanded from just a couple of schools to more than fifteen, and has more recently emerged from a long period of stultifying introspection with the establishment of a professional organization, the International Association of Structural Integrators (IASI—www.theiasi.org), which has brought together the Rolfers with practitioners from the Guild for Structural Integration, Hellerworkers, SOMA, CORE, KMI, IPSB, ISI, ISM, and other three-letter anagrams. This organization has extended the outreach of SI, brought people of like mind together, and begun the process of building some professional heft for those who are dedicated to Ida Rolf’s work.

The increased power that comes from cooperation is evident in the IASI symposia, yearbooks, a psychometrically valid evaluation tool, and, most importantly, the Fascial Research Conference (www.fascia2007.com)—all of which point to a rich and muscular future for spatial medicine—healing through shaping—as well as significant contribution to the physical education for the twenty-first century.

As individuals within each approach, we tend to our one-on-one healing, but it is to this larger task—redesigning the way young people are handled, so that they can live an authentically embodied life within the wonderfully frenetic electronic environment of connection we are busy creating—that we must ultimately dedicate ourselves in the coming years. Proper handling, movement, and exercise for the next generation of our kids will dramatically reduce healthcare costs, increase communication, understanding, and intimacy, as well as prepare a set of people empowered to deal with the nexus of problems coming our way in this next interesting century.

Whitney Lowe
It is a great honor to be asked to contribute to this celebration of the twenty-year anniversary of ABMP. I have been thinking back over the major events that have shaped the last twenty years, and of course there are so many. Instead of trying to go over them all, I picked one major development that has been very influential to the profession and has had a huge influence on me over this time period.

It is hard to speak of any aspect of our modern lives that has not been affected by the computer over the last twenty years. With massage being such a kinesthetic art, there is not a great deal of discussion about how the computer has intersected with our work. Upon closer inspection, though, we can see a multitude of ways that it has influenced us.

Individual practitioners are now using computers to store databases with client records, produce gift certificates and mailings, keep financial records, and produce documents and reports to share with other health professionals. Yet, one of the most powerful effects of the computer for individual practitioners has been enhanced communication. Massage therapy can be a lonely occupation sometimes because we are in the treatment room with only a few people each day. The advent of Internet discussion groups has given massage therapists all around the world an opportunity to connect with other colleagues and develop a sense of community. These discussions are invaluable to compare ideas, ask for input, or debate interesting subjects in our field. I have participated in some of these groups since the early 1990s when I first learned about them, and many deep friendships with colleagues around the globe have developed from these connections.

The computer has also opened the door to a world of publishing possibilities for practitioners that was not even imaginable twenty years ago. With the advent of computer graphics and desktop publishing programs, individuals produce high-quality publications or presentations, all of which serve to enhance our professionalism and help us share information with others about massage.

While it is certainly a much more recent trend, it is hard to talk about the impact of the computer on our field in the last twenty years without talking about the recent development of online training programs. Initially appearing for continuing education, the use of computers and distance education is also being used for some subjects in entry-level training as well. Judging by trends in other sectors of the educational environment, the increased use of distance learning with computers is likely to continue rapid growth, at least for the immediate future.

Judging by the numbers alone, one can’t help but look at the massage profession and remark at the phenomenal growth of the last twenty years. It is wonderful to think about the millions of people whose lives have been greatly enhanced by the growth of massage during this time period. I, for one, am really excited to see where we go in the next twenty years as well.

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