By Beth Maddox
The answer is that you need both. Why? Because for every ailment that one brings to a massage therapist, there is a myriad of possible causes. It is essential that your massage therapist can sift through the suspects and gather the evidence that reveals the true culprit. In the example of lower back pain, the cause can be nerve root compression, nerve entrapment between muscles, sacro-iliac dysfunction, hormonal issues, a bulging disc, referred pain from muscle, or even from a kidney issue, to name a few.
General massage rubs where it hurts. Deep tissue massage rubs harder where it hurts. Rubbing where it hurts does not address the underlying issue. For one thing, some of the causes don’t even live in the vicinity! Even when the causative tissue resides in the area local to the pain, general rubbing (light or deep) merely passes over the muscle broadly, never addressing the tissue specifically.
Another flawed approach is to treat all the possibilities in the hope that the problem will inadvertently be affected. Many tissues are unnecessarily disturbed. And at the end of the day, if the client experiences any relief, the therapist never knows which muscle was the problem. So the “cross your fingers and hope I get it” treatment has to be applied again and again. Sound like fun?
At Precision Massage, we are committed to finding each client’s exact problem. How? The first key lies in the thorough evaluation. Every Precision Massage therapist is not only licensed and nationally certified, but also certified in the Precision Neuromuscular Therapy (PNMT) approach. A PNMT therapist considers the client’s complaints, while exploring his/her history, posture, range of motion, strength, and tissue texture. The therapist also applies special tests that can point to specific muscles or conditions. Collecting all of this data eliminates suspects, until only the real problem(s) remains.
The second PNMT key to success is the thorough grasp (no pun intended!) of anatomy. This ensures that the identified muscle or fascia at play will be treated with precision and accuracy. The combination of stellar diagnostics and targeted treatment results in a high degree of success in resolving each individual patient’s pain or dysfunction. In the Precision Massage treatment rooms it is common to hear, “that’s my exact pain”, or “why didn’t anyone else ever find my problem?” The answer? No one ever bothered to look.
Beth Maddox is the owner and lead therapist of Precision Massage, LLC, and is a licensed physical therapist, a Nationally Certified and neuromuscular therapy board certified massage therapist. She is certified in Precision Neuromuscular Therapy and is on the teaching staff of NMT Midwest. Precision Massage is located in St. Louis, Missouri. To contact Precision Massage, visit us at www.precision-massage.com,
or e-mail to precisionmassage@att.net, call 314-412-2048.