When you first come in to Caring Palms, you are asked to fill out some paperwork, usually four or five pages. The information we look for is basic in a sense. We look for contact information so we can get a hold of you if we need to. We look for health information so we know what is going on with you, and so we don’t hurt you. We also ask where you heard of us so we know what advertising is working, and we ask you to read and sign a paper describing what is entailed in the session you are here to receive.
This all sounds like a lot, but it is necessary. And the most important part in that is the health questionnaire. We need to know what is going on so we can help you the best.
A lot of people don’t give us all the information that they should (as Faith mentioned in her article). It is a joke with my students that do massage when I ask how often their clients give them all the information they need. Their answer is usually “never”. This is why I scan people’s energies to see where their problems are.
Many won’t give their birth date as they don’t want people to know how old they are. Unfortunately, this could be as crucial as any of the other information. Whether we like it or not, our age can be a determining factor on what type of massage we get.
Others leave out crucial information. There was one client years ago that did not mention that she had bone spurs in her neck. My scan revealed that she had neck issues, and I discussed this with her. I then worked deeply into her neck, and she loved the work while I was doing it. Later that day, she was in pain from the work I did. This could have been avoided by her being honest in what she told me, or put down on paper.
I have had a few people that were completely honest, and put down things that could have been life threatening if I had done massage on them. One person had thrombosis which is a lot of stuff in the blood stream waiting to break off and clog the heart or brain. Since massage increases blood flow, this was definitely something to be avoided. And although he told me he gets massage other places, I was not willing to take the risk of killing him.
As I have said many times before, massage is not just that luxury of relaxation that one expects from a European spa. Massage is healthcare. We fix people. We align bodies, remove pain, return people back to full health after injury. We take problems that have persisted in people for months and sometimes years, and make them better. We use physical methods or energy methods. If one service does not work, maybe we have another that will. If we know something that might be helpful, but it is something we don’t do, we will recommend someone else.
We are here to help make you better if we can. We can do all the nice relaxing stuff you usually think of when you think of massage. But we do a lot more than that. We are here to help, and the best we can do will be determined on how much you tell us, and how well we follow our intuition. As Faith said, we don’t want to be chasing symptoms. We want to find the cause, and fix it if we can. Sometimes this means working in other places from where it hurts.
As Myofascial Release (MFR) teaches, find the pain, find the cause elsewhere. Believe it or not, MFR teaches that the best treatment for headaches is to align the pelvis. So, we are all connected, and a problem in one place may be caused by something somewhere else.
But if you help us, and let us, we will do our best to make you better.