Portland Home Massage

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.  --Richard Feynman
I began this series of posts by listing some ways people think of massage:
By local expectation, law, and custom, massage is a business, selling a personal service, as a hairdresser does; and it's a medical intervention, treating musculoskeletal ills, as a chiropractor does. And then (not by law, but by alternative custom)...

"massage is... a medical intervention, treating musculoskeletal ills, as a chiropractor does."
My skepticism about massage as a medical intervention is well-known, even notorious, in some circles. No need to go over that again here.
Medicine is where the money is, of course. The deepest pockets we're ever likely to dip into are those of insurance companies. And it's where at least one brand of dignity is: some of us long to be thought of as health care professionals....

Viewed in one light, I said, massage is a business, selling a personal service, as a hairdresser does. When I think of it in this light, I always think of John Wayne calling peremptorily for his rubdown:
That's a long time ago, and a lot of water under the cultural bridge, but it still illustrates a lot the massage that actually happens in the world. We like to talk about massage as medical treatment or as cosmic connection, but much of it is just "where...

Tracy Walton, one of the most thoughtful people who writes about massage, considered a passage she wrote twenty years ago, and pondered whether she could still endorse it:
Handwritten Massage
She decided she could, that she did. But in mulling it over, and thinking about what massage as a business and a medical intervention has become, she wonders: is this what we wanted? Is this really what we were trying to create?...