What a difference a massage makes

How training in touch treatments is evolving to help individuals to have a better quality of life, from improving mobility to reducing pain resulting from cancer and cancer treatment.

The first challenge of the spa industry when it comes to cancer, has been ensuring that there is training available so therapists feel supported in their ability to safely provide treatments to anyone who has had a cancer diagnosis. With that process firmly underway, those at the next level of expertise are not simply making it possible to have touch therapies, but to show the incredible benefits that massage (in particular) can offer before, during, and after cancer treatment.

Here, Marc Innes – owner of The School of Natural Therapies, and Joseph O’Dwyer – Director of Sport & Remedial Studies, write about how training in touch treatments for cancer is evolving to help individuals to have a better quality of life, from improving mobility to reducing pain resulting from cancer and cancer treatment.

Where we are and where we’re going in cancer touch training

Ensuring therapists don’t need to turn people away from a treatment because of a cancer diagnosis is essential, but we are starting to move beyond that in training as well. Touch therapies always help people to feel better on some level, but this area of specialist training will offer additional real relief from dysfunction and pain resulting from surgery or other cancer treatments. This is about touch therapies that are focused on living with and beyond cancer and improving quality of life.

Therapists are deeply caring people, and when they come for this higher level training, they are focused on wanting to treat people with cancer and make sure they’re delivering meaningful remedial care. Where the industry has largely been focused until relatively recently, is making sure it’s simply possible for touch therapists to treat someone who’s had a cancer diagnosis, but we can do more – especially when it comes to supporting individuals where the medicine stops.

In particular, people who have cancer often find that while doctors focus on treating the disease, issues resulting from treatment or as a byproduct of cancer itself, don’t have a lot of answers and lack awareness of some of the remedial help that therapists can provide. For example, many live with pain or limited mobility in certain body areas, resulting from surgeries like reconstruction, mastectomies, bowel resections, and so forth. Equally, soft tissue damage can be caused by radiotherapy – we get a lot of people who have had radiotherapy for prostate cancer, for example; they often experience lower back pain. Other issues include peripheral neuropathy in the feet and hands, compromised lymphatic regions of the body, and more, can be as a result of soft tissue damage and fascial restrictions.

How therapists make a difference

It’s not all cancer touch treatment training that offers more functional support for these things, but it is the way more advanced massage training is going. Importantly, we, as therapists, can help analyse and identify some of those issues with the correct training. In doing so, it doesn’t just create opportunities to help clients feel better, but it’s also very rewarding for therapists themselves to see their clients leave the treatment room with improved posture, movement and less pain.

Most of the people we train are surprised by what’s possible. Often they expect a box-checking massage course, but then you realise you’re dealing with a person with cancer, the multifaceted impact that cancer surgery, radiation, and drugs can have, and you’re in a position to offer some relief. You, as a therapist can make them feel welcome and leave feeling emotionally charged.

We tend to talk about three areas of touch when it comes to clients – those who come along and don’t want to be pulled around too much; those who want massage; and those who ask for help with a specific pain or challenge. What happens over time, as therapists build trust with people, is that confidence grows, and clients start to request what they want or need. In short, you develop a scenario where they know they’re in safe hands and that’s a wonderful thing to achieve because ultimately, this is about quality of life.

Support after cancer treatment

A lot of cancer patients talk about falling off a cliff edge when it comes to support after medical treatment finishes. We see that at its most acute with the tradition of ringing a bell on the hospital ward when your chemo ends.

Of course, it’s important to celebrate those milestones, but for many it feels as though they’re expected to simply go back to normal life. You don’t – it’s a new phase with a new set of things to deal with. You might want to go to the gym but dealing with pain and dysfunction makes you worried about making it worse; you might have had a bowel resection and that has long-term implications for digestion for example. Often this kind of pain is only treated with painkillers, but one of the most common problems is scar tissue and soft tissue dysfunction, which can be very restrictive.

People think that what we see on the surface is the issue, especially when it comes to scars, but we call it the ‘iceberg syndrome’. Scars from surgery – mastectomies, bowel resections, and so forth – those go far deeper into the body.

For example, we worked with a lady who couldn’t have a gastrointestinal transit comfortably after having had an island of skin and fat tissue taken from her stomach to reform a new breast. So, it’s not only the recipient site that can be uncomfortable, but the donor site as well. Without going into detail, she had a massage and immediately it helped relieve the problem.

Focusing on the fascia

A lot of this future-focused work hinges on understanding the fascia. Something that has been traditionally ignored by medical science over the years. A comparatively new science, we think of it like a onesie under the skin – if you take the middle out and stitch the ends together you wouldn’t expect the onesie to move in the same way it did before.

The fascia is a really complex network of fibres and the biggest organ you have never heard of. It influences everything we do, and it simply doesn’t heal like a cut on your finger; when you damage it, it becomes complex and creates a chain of other events because that network has been disrupted. That’s why you might feel pain in an area that seems totally unrelated to your surgery or cancer treatment. For example, we had one lady who had a double mastectomy and came to us with pain in her legs. When a therapist understands myofascial chains, the link between treatment and ‘unrelated’ areas of pain becomes clear.

Often scans won’t show fascial restrictions so conventional approaches won’t reveal the issues. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong on a scan, so a doctor won’t really be able to help, but with the way advanced massage training is going we’re looking at working in a way that effectively buys space and joins the dots in that bodily network to facilitate movement and ease pain that’s often gone unexplained otherwise.  We think it’s safe to say there’s no musculoskeletal problem that doesn’t involve fascia if it’s damaged. That might be from disease itself, surgery, or radiotherapy, which we know alters the structure of soft tissue, so it can impact tendons, ligaments, and joints, and will also affect movement.

It’s a really exciting space, opening up a bigger understanding in the industry of muscles and movement. It’s very much where things are going rather than where things are, and that’s brilliant because that means there’s more we can do, more we can learn, and we’re really only just getting started on what the spa industry can achieve for anyone who’s had a cancer diagnosis.

This is the way we are heading in cancer touch training – where the future of care in this area is about relaxation, but it also goes further to improve individuals’ quality of life.

Find out more about massage
https://satcc.co.uk/massage/