The Travolta Clause

by | Jun 4, 2012 | Business, In the News

When John Doe #1 recently filed suit over John Travolta’s wandering hands in the massage room my immediate reaction was, “Well, there goes the first shoe.”

Sure enough, over the next few weeks other massage practitioners came out of the woodwork testifying to similar experiences and the tabloid press went into overdrive. At last count, the number of  accusers was up to five.

In the massage industry this was old news. I heard from practitioners over a decade ago who had Mr. Travolta as a customer and told essentially the same story. With a little bit of discrete asking around as I traveled the country I found out he had a well-deserved reputation of a celebrity to avoid in the massage room as did a number of other high profile, famous folks. Ho hum.

However, the suit did bring to mind the question about the potential fallout of reporting customers who propose illegal activity to massage practitioners. After all, if someone on the street solicited sexual services in exchange for money to an undercover police officer, that person would be arrested.

So what happens if a practitioner reports illegal sexual advances from a customer to the police? I was particularly curious as to whether our two primary professional liability insurance organizations would support the practitioner. So, I put the question to the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) and Associated Massage and Bodywork Professionals (ABMP).

Specifically, I wondered:

  • Do they encourage such reporting?
  • Does their liability policies support such reporting?
  • What if the customer sues the practitioner for defamation?
  • Will they defend a member against such a suit?

So, I asked and got prompt responses from both organizations. First, from Ron Precht, Communications Manager of AMTA:

AMTA has always encouraged massage therapists to protect themselves, if they feel they are in danger or feel a client has put them in an unprofessional position.  That includes reporting incidents to police, when the massage therapist feels threatened.

The personal injury portion of the AMTA insurance policy states that injury arising out of offenses of libel and slander are covered when committed in the conduct of the enrolled member’s professional services. So, yes, the policy is intended to defend insured members when they are named in lawsuits alleging libel or slander arising from their provision of massage therapy services – such as when reporting a client for illegal sexual advances. Of course, the facts and circumstances of each claim are unique, so coverage can only be assured after evaluation of the specifics of a claim or lawsuit.  If it was found that the insured member lied or intentionally disparaged another, coverage would be excluded.

Next, from Les Sweeny, one of the owners of ABMP:

Regarding reporting advances, we are strongly in favor of it; we want our members to act in their own best interests and safety, but to help identify inappropriate behavior. If a customer were to sue a member for slander/defamation, the insurance policy included with membership would cover the cost of defending the member.

So, the upshot is that both the AMTA and ABMP policies contain a “Travolta Clause” protecting their policyholders if they report a misbehaving customer and the customer decides to counter-sue. That is good news. It makes it much easier to be clear with customers who are thinking about crossing the line. And, if you feel threatened in any way, don’t be afraid to call the police.

Let’s just hope that the massage practitioners in the Travolta saga have their policies paid up-to-date.

How Sticky is Massage?

by | Jan 9, 2012 | Business

Stickability ImageIn the world wide web, “stickiness” refers to how long you can keep a user on your website or how often you can get them to return. It is a measure of user engagement and loyalty.

So how loyal and engaged, that is to say, how sticky are massage customers? Judging by the frequency with which Americans get regular massage, the sad answer would have to be that massage is not very “sticky” at all. [Note: If you want to bypass the calculations and jump to the bottom line numbers, scroll down to the last three paragraphs.]

There are only two professional consumer surveys done for the massage profession. The one commissioned by the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) is annual and the other, sponsored by the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals (ABMP), is biennial.

While neither of them explicitly states how often American adults get massaged, with a bit of combining and extrapolation of the two surveys, we can arrive at a reasonable approximation.

The most recent ABMP survey reports that, of the number of people who actually got a massage in 2010, their frequency of utilization was as follows:

  • 22% had 1 massage
  • 22% had 2 massages
  • 28% had 3-5 massages
  • 6% had 6-10 massages
  • 17% had 11-20 massages
  • 3% got 21 or more massages

The previous ABMP survey, for 2008, reported these percentages:

  • 32% had 1 massage
  • 21% had 2 massages
  • 35% had 3-5 massages
  • 5% had 6-10 massages
  • 5% had 11-20 massages
  • 2% got 21 or more massages

Now, since both the AMTA and ABMP surveys report the total number of adults getting a massage in a twelve month period, we can use the percentages above to get a range of how many total U.S. adults appear in each frequency category. In the AMTA survey, the total number of adults getting massaged ranges from a high of 24% in 2007 (pre-recession) to their current figure of 18% (between July 2010 and July 2011, unchanged from the prior 12 months). The ABMP figures are strikingly lower. In their latest survey only 16% of US adults got a massage in 2010, up from 14% in 2008.

To chart it out I multiplied the ABMB frequency of utilization percentages by the percentages of people in the U.S. reporting they received a massage in the two time periods surveyed by each organization. Here are the results of each survey by category.

Frequency of Massages Per Year AMTA ABMP
2007/08 – 24% 2010/11 – 18% 2008 – 14% 2010 -16%
1
Massage		 7.7% 5.8% 4.5% 3.5%
2
Massages		 5.0% 3.8% 2.9% 3.5%
3-5
Massages		 8.4% 6.3% 1.0% 4.5%
6-10
Massages		 1.2% 0.9% 0.7% 1.0%
11-20
Massages		 1.2% 0.9% 0.7% 2.7%
21+
Massages		 0.5% 0.4% 0.2% 0.5%

Hang in there. We are almost to the finish line. While I wish that the ABMP survey had broken out the specific number of people who got 3, 4 or 5 massages in a year, using the data we have, we can sort the frequency into three sub-categories:

  • Infrequent users – 1 or 2 massages per year
  • Occasional users – 3-5 massages per year
  • Regular users – 6 or more massages per year (less than the average number of haircuts per year)

With these definitions and using the best case ABMP figures, we can see that, at the most, only 4.2% of the adult population in the U.S. are regular users of massage. The best case data from the AMTA puts the percentage at 2.9%. Ouch! No wonder the associations do not make it easy to get this number and prefer us to focus on the 16 to 24% who got at least one massage in a year. In another article I make the case that this lack of loyalty and engagement, of “stickiness,” is primarily a result of the high price of massage and discuss what we can do to make massage more affordable and accessible.

One final note: We need to have better data and better analysis of the data we currently have. We can’t make good decisions about our future unless we have good data. The calculations above should have been readily accessible to anyone. The glaring discrepancies in the results between the two surveys should be explainable. The ABMP should be congratulated for the relatively comprehensive and transparent way in which it presents its data compared to the AMTA. However, I would urge both organizations to make all of their raw data from every study they commission available to anyone for analysis. The truth is out there, we are just having a hard time finding it.

How Massage Became Therapy

by | Nov 28, 2011 | History, Politics

The year was 1983 and the oldest national association of massage practitioners was about to change the face of an industry by turning “massage” into “massage therapy.” This is the story of what led up to that moment.

The association making this pivotal shift was founded in 1943 by a group of 29 graduates of the College of Swedish Massage in Chicago. Originally calling itself the Association of Masseurs and Masseuses, fifteen years later it had changed its name to the American Massage & Therapy Association (AM&TA). Now, in 1983, the group was poised to take the conjunction “and” out of the middle of their name and become what we know today as simply the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA).

The rationale for the name change was simple–to address the two primary forces that had always plagued the growth of massage: public perception and economics.

Managing the image of therapeutic massage has always been a public relations nightmare. There are only two occupations where skilled touch is the primary modality of service delivery. One is legal and (in most places) the other is not.

The confusion in the public mind between “adult entertainment” massage and “therapeutic” massage has been around in one form or another for centuries. Indeed, the mere mention of the word “massage” in 1983 was enough to provoke what was then called “the snicker response,”  as word evoked images of “masseuses” in skimpy outfits plying their trade late into the night in sleazy massage “parlors”.

While the mass media served up this image in large portions, it also offered a second association in movies and television: that of massage as a luxury service for the rich and famous. If one got past the first association, the second inevitably got in the way of people identifying with massage because the service was, quite simply, unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans.

So, in the early 1980’s the thought was, let’s reposition massage in the public mind and kill two birds with one stone. If massage could be turned into a legitimate health care profession, then people would no longer presume that massage practitioners were prostitutes. Likewise, as a health care service, massage could be covered by third party payments, as was already the case in some Canadian provinces.

And so, the name was changed and what was once two, massage and therapy, became one—massage therapy. In the next article, I will analyze the impact of this well-intentioned decision and argue that this minor alteration solidified a strategy that has had only limited success and, in some ways, has actually inhibited the effort to bring skilled touch to the masses.

Is it time for massage to embrace touch?

by | Nov 11, 2011 | Education, Politics, Touch

The hand of GodWhich profession should hold the keys to the storehouse that contains all of  the world’s  knowledge about human touch? Besides bodyworkers, is there any other (legal) occupation with more practical and theoretical knowledge about touch? I don’t think so and yet I have been struck by the fact that the massage profession often seems to relate to touch the same way fish relate to water. We take it for granted.

I believe that the primary function of entry level massage programs is to train the next generation of  touch specialists and, obviously, that means their highest priority should be teaching students how to give and receive touch. And that is not happening.

I know it is not happening because one of the questions I regularly ask bodyworkers in my classes is how many of them graduated from massage school with other students whom they didn’t want touching them? Most often, every hand goes up.

I also know massage schools aren’t prioritizing touch because although we have plenty of  textbooks on anatomy, physiology, pathology, ethics, techniques, body mechanics or business and we also have general textbooks that cover all of those topics, we still have no single textbook that explains everything every bodywork professional needs to know about touch.

Graduates may study the anatomy of the skin and touch receptors, but do they study the emotional, psychological, familial and cultural anatomy out of which touch attitudes, perception and receptivity arises? They may learn how to take a medical history, but how many massage schools teach their students how to take a touch history?

As a profession we are squandering a golden opportunity to advocate for a part of the human experience as essential to the development and maintenance of good health and well being as the air we breath or the food and water we consume. Everyone needs touch and lots of it but because touch in our culture is the orphan sense, most people living in urban environments wake up every day with a serious touch deficit.

The ears have music, the eyes have art, the nose and taste buds have food and perfumes and our sense of touch has–what? How exactly do we feed our sense of touch? Family affection and sex are the two obvious answers, but I would suspect that in most contemporary lives these options are in short supply.

The obvious answer for filling this touch gap is massage. Isn’t it time for the massage profession to embrace touch? Sure, massage therapy trying to be a health care profession is good, but isn’t offering the gift of unconditional touch with simple massage even more fundamental?

At most, only 4.2% of the adult population in the United States gets regular massage. If we want to have any hope of breaking through that ceiling, then massage needs to go back to its roots. Turning “massage” into “massage therapy” has helped the industry shed its shady past but at the same time has sidelined the most important reason people actually get a massage: because it makes them feel better. Not better in a medical sense, but better because they feel more real, alive and whole.

With simple massage the left brain starts talking to their right brain and everything above the neck starts noticing everything below the neck. By the end of a massage people’s core sense of trust and security in a fundamentally unsafe world gets renewed and they are able to face their lives and the world with a calm, balanced optimism.

On a physical level massage enhances circulation so that the body’s own natural healing systems can function optimally. Little problems are far less likely to become big problems with regular massage.

Redefining “massage” as “massage therapy” as the AMTA did in 1983 was mostly a defensive move. The thinking went, if massage is a health care profession, no one will mistake us for prostitutes. But we are, for the most part, past that issue. It is time to get back to our roots and highlight what we are better at than anyone else in the culture.: touching people safely, unconditionally, with clear intentions, significant training and experience.

Question: What do you think is the most important role of massage professionals?