Touch Therapy

Massage, on it's diverse methods, is maybe one of the healthiest life habits that have disappeared from our lives, the more they have gotten further from pre-office existence.

True, not in every culture or social status you would have found a weekly visit to the Spa, but indeed amongst household medicine most available are always manual treatments: Massage for a hurting stomach or head, back and shoulders, have been under hand a lot before paracetamol has been.

Many medicines that are sold off the shelf today, treat symptoms for problems that can be prevented or treated better by a simple massage.

The obvious example is sore muscles, but it is by no means the only one; It is easy and quick to apply an ointment that sooths the pain, and maybe even treats the mild tendon inflammation that is often a natural result of a repeated incorrect use of a muscle, as a result of physical trauma etc. But the ointment usually does not solve the problem, and some times contains less than recommended substances that do affect internal affairs of our body, even though it is only used externally. The alternative is to open, literally, the sore area to blood which will have brought to the area everything our own body has produced, to treat the problem based on the knowledge it acquired during all its life, and all the years since our evolution has begun. 

Don't get me wrong, I am not (yet?) a puritan, I regard the achievements of chemical medicine as impressive and blessed. Nevertheless, like many other "Alternative" medicine practitioners, I believe they should come at the end of the list of treatment methods, and not at it's head.

In fact, we see all around us that western medicine is more and more recognizing the benefits of massages, doctors writing down prescriptions for manual treatments as a standard. Here, it is not only theirs but our own job to make the mental shift. To not be as quick to reach for the pill, to make time and treat ourselves, before we break enough to actually need it.