Can Thai Massage Help

With Serious Diseases?

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Often students want to know which Thai Massage techniques work best for a certain
disease or condition. 

While it is certainly very important to have the right repertoire of techniques for
speci c conditions and to know how to implement them, there is another factor
which is even more important. And that has nothing to do with techniques.

Let me use my own practice as an example. Over the years I have worked with several
clients who had severe issues, ranging from Multiple Sclerosis to major postural issues to
Parkinsons and others.

Some of them had gone through the medical establishment and had received no help that
resulted in an improvement in their condition.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Can Thai Massage help with serious conditions?

In some cases they approached me as a last desperate attempt to nd help since the medical
science had given up on them or had just not worked for them.

So why would they approach a Thai Massage therapist?

The answer is that they did not approach just a Thai Massage therapist, but someone who
uses Thai Massage and a number of other healing arts methods and skills to help people.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Why do people heal?

They don’t just heal because of some fancy tricked out massage techniques. While those can
certainly help, they won’t do it just by themselves. Here are some other and much more
important reasons:

People have to have a reason to heal. What do I mean with this? There has to be something
in their life they can look forward to, something that inspires them to keep going.

This might be a project, a passion, a goal, or their family, or a contribution they want to make
to the world.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

When your therapy will not help the condition

If someone is seriously ill and has nothing to look forward to, they might pretend that they
want to heal, but in reality their disease is their way out of a life that does not seem to have
any more value for them. No matter how great your techniques are, they won’t do anything
in such cases.

How do you nd out if your client really wants to heal?

You have to talk to them and nd out what makes them tick, what inspires them, what is
their reason for living.

If they don’t have one, you can try to help them develop a reason for living.

Without that your therapy has little chance of improving the condition.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Recognizing our limitations

There are all kinds of cases ranging from miraculous recoveries to situations where your
efforts do not produce any results. There can be several reasons for that:

  ome conditions just cannot be helped by massage

S
 Your skills might not be suf cient for a particular case
 The client might be better served by another healing modality
 The client does not resonate with you or vice versa
 Your ego or your expectations are getting in the way
 Or any number of other reasons

There is a ne balance between wanting to help and being attached to a certain outcome.
The rst is a function of the heart and the second is a function of the ego.

Shooting for the stars while recognizing our limitations is an important attitude to develop.
We never know when we will see a miraculous result, and we need to be open to this
possibility.

At the same time we need to be detached and recognize the limitations of a situation not as
a negative factor, but as a simple fact. 

Adjusting your treatment objective

If your approach isn’t working, you might have to re-evaluate your treatment objective and
switch from “ x it mode” to “let me help you to feel better right now”.

The end result of a session doesn’t necessarily have to be the improvement of a physical
condition. Sometimes the greatest service you can do is offer your caring, loving touch.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

The mind and diseases

I have had clients who kept telling me that they had a certain disease. When I asked them
what the symptoms were, in some cases they told me they didn’t have any.

This can happen in such cases like AIDS where antibodies may be present in the blood, but
there had never been any symptoms of a disease.

Another example is bromyalgia which is a collection of symptoms which are often not very
clearly de ned. In both cases, AIDS and bromyalgia, the list of symptoms which are
attributed to those conditions can change and has been changed over time.

So nobody totally agrees on what it is, what symptoms are part of it, what causes it and what
heals it.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Misdiagnosis and nocebos

To top it off, misdiagnosis in both of these cases has happened frequently. A client might
have been diagnosed at some point, but has no symptoms.

If such a person is convinced in their mind that they do have such a disease, symptoms or
not, then they will most likely develop those symptoms to live up to their image of
themselves.

It can be a self-ful lling prophesy. It’s also

called a nocebo.

This is the opposite of a placebo, i.e. you talk

yourself into being more sick than you really
are, or you talk yourself into being sick even if
you are not.

Part of my therapy in such cases has always

been to change the self-image of my clients
from a dis-eased person to a person who feels
healthy, or who identi es with the healing
process instead of the disease.

In other words, people can talk or think themselves into being sick and they can talk or think
themselves out of it – at least in some cases.

There is plenty of documented proof – like placebo studies – for such cases available.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Thai Massage and serious diseases

But what about diseases with real and often severe symptoms like MS or Parkinsons or
extreme postural issues? I have personally worked with clients who had all these issues and I
have seen those issues improve greatly or even disappear.

Now if you ask me if my Thai Massage techniques xed the disease, I have to say no – or at
least not all by themselves.

So why did they heal? In all of those seemingly miraculous improvements there were other
factors present which were more important than massage techniques. Here is a list of some
of them:

  he clients trusted me completely

T
 They were convinced that I would be able to help them
 The clients had a reason to heal, something to look forward to after the
healing process
 They were ready and willing to do whatever it took to activate the healing
 They were not just passive clients, but they worked with me by
implementing my suggestions regarding their diet, their attitude, their
thought patterns, their exercise, and their lifestyle habits
 They worked with me consistently on a regular basis

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Above and beyond standard Thai Massage

These clients did not just receive Thai Massage, they went through visualization exercises
with me, they followed my instructions on how to use their mind, their breath, and their
intentions to stimulate the healing.

For my part, I used my energy, my breathing, my intentions, my communication skills and all
my massage skills to activate and stimulate the healing process in those clients.

Thai Healing Massage Academy

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

There is more than one way to de ne massage

Doesn’t all this go beyond standard
massage therapy? This depends on how
you de ne massage.

If you de ne it as a sequence of physical

techniques, then yes, my approach went
way beyond that.

However, I de ne Thai Massage or any

massage differently.  For me, the physical
techniques are just one aspect of the
therapy.

If the other elements which I mentioned above are not present, then even the best massage
techniques will not help much in such cases of serious diseases.

Why? Because you are not just dealing with someone’s malfunctioning anatomy like a
broken machine, but with a dis-eased mind, a malfunctioning thought pattern, bad
lifestyle habits, bad diet, negative thinking, misinformation, and self-defeating mental
programs.

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Different kinds of massage therapists

If you just want to help people relax, improve their range of motion, or loosen up tight
muscles, then you won’t have to worry much about all those additional elements.

But if you have an interest in working with seriously ill people, then you will need more skills
than just massage techniques.

How much can you in uence healing?

And nally, you will need an understanding that you are never in control when it comes to
healing. Every one of us will die sooner or later, and you cannot change that.

You don’t know what someone’s path or destiny or karma is, you don’t know when
someone’s time has come, and that’s why you cannot be attached to the results of your
work.

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

You are never the cause of the healing process, but you can be the activator, the facilitator,
the accelerator of it.

And in some cases, you cannot do more than make it easier for your client to tolerate the
disease. That’s a perfectly valid treatment objective, by the way.

How to measure your results as a therapist

Not every massage therapist is able or
willing or even interested in working with
seriously ill people. 

This is not the path of all therapists, just

like not all doctors want  to be heart
surgeons.

But  some therapists are drawn to this

way of working. I have done so many times myself – and sometimes with excellent
success.

How do you measure success in such cases? Success is not necessarily a clearly de ned
goal. Success is if you can improve someone’s quality of life, even if only for a short time.

This does not necessarily mean that the disease disappears.

It can mean that the disease process is slowed down, made more tolerable, improves or even
reverses.

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

It can also mean that you help someone prepare for their inevitable transition by making it
less painful and less frightful for them.

You won’t know which one of those it is, and you will need to accept all those scenarios as
valid treatment results.

My perspective on Thai Massage and healing

I am writing this from the perspective of someone who lives in Asia where various healing
therapies have been used for many centuries to deal with people’s problems long before
there was modern medical science.

If you live in a country where there are strict rules and regulations regarding what you can
say or do or suggest to a client as a massage therapist, then you will have to work within the
framework of the laws in your country.

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

Can Thai Massage Help With Serious Diseases?

The purpose of this article is to help you see what is possible, not to offer speci c treatment
methods. It is based on my personal experience only, and not on any scienti c research.

What I have done will not work for everyone else, and not everybody will be interested in it
either.

It is my hope that it will be an inspiration for some therapists who want to expand the
concept of their work.

This is meant for therapists who see Thai Massage not just as a collection of fancy exotic
stretches, but as a body-mind-spirit healing system which has a truly amazing potential, and
as a way to make a substantial difference in the lives of some people who really need it.

The author, Shama Kern, is the founder and director of Thai

Healing Massage Academy.  He has been practicing and
teaching Thai Massage for 20 years, and he is the creator of
20 Thai Massage online training courses.

Related Reading:
The 5 Myths Of Thai Massage Training
How Massage Can Touch Bodies, Hearts And Minds
Massage With An Inner Vision

Thai Healing Massage Academy