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Massage therapy found as solution for many with specific back issues.

Lynn Martin is a Sebastopol farmer who had scoliosis as a kid and can't afford to have her body break down. To keep moving, she depends on regular massage. But hers is no pampering, blissful rub-down. She goes to an orthopedic massage therapist who works with her on specific back issues.

“If I want to relax, I'll go to a spa. This is body work,” said Martin, who credits massage with giving her “movement in a part of my back that I cannot remember having movement in before.” No longer considered just a luxury pampering for the rich or a wink-wink euphemism for something sexier, massage or body work has become a popular, legitimate health regimen in the way of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture.

Santa Rosa writer and teacher Ianthe Brautigan started getting special oncology massage to prepare for surgery for ovarian cancer in 2008. “I had a tumor larger than a grapefruit and I had this idea that if I did massage before surgery it would relax the muscles and make it easier to extract the tumor,” she said.

Her massage therapist, she said, not only worked on her body. “She also gave me a visualization to hold onto and so my surgery went extremely well.” Brautigan goes to Susan Kirk, a nurse who went to massage school while working on the oncology floor at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

“When I went to school, in 1996, massage for people with cancer was just starting,” said Kirk. “Until that time it was discouraged because it was believed to spread cancer cells.” That notion has been debunked, she said, by studies including the 1999 book, “Medicine Hands,” by Gayle MacDonald, who is considered a pioneer in oncology massage.

Source: PressDemocrat