MM Chapter 19: Health Care Massage

Treatment planning for healthcare sessions is more complex than for wellness sessions. The client is likely to have a diagnosed condition or injury that affects your treatment choices. This section provides a foundation for treatment planning by exploring the continuum of health, the rehabilitation process, methods for assessing the data you have gathered, ideas for […]

Chapter 13 introduced the topics of range of motion, limits to movement, and end feel. By this point in your massage training, you are likely well versed in these concepts. If you need a refresher, review that section of Chapter 13. This topic builds on that information and adds to an understanding of active, passive,

The term posture refers to the arrangement of the body’s parts in space, in other words, the body’s position. Gait is the client’s walking pattern. Posture and gait assessments are regularly used in healthcare massage to gather information that guides treatment choices.  This section explores the basic biomechanics of posture and gait, postural dysfunctions, and

Clients seeking healthcare massage are often in pain. Pain can be caused by a soft-tissue injury or as a symptom of a variety of conditions, such as fibromyalgia or arthritis, among many others. Pain is an unpleasant feeling that signals actual or potential injury to the body and that has both physical and emotional components. 

This topic considers the sequence of events that often occur in a healthcare massage, in advance of later chapter sections presenting specific assessment techniques. It also covers documentation related to intake interviews, functional goal setting, and client self-care.

Throughout many chapters, this textbook has differentiated between wellness massage and healthcare massage. Wellness massage is discussed in detail in Chapters 10 and 12. Healthcare massage (also referred to as treatment massage, rehabilitative massage, therapeutic massage, or similar terms) is massage that addresses chronic soft-tissue holding patterns that lead to dysfunction, soft-tissue injury, or chronic