A massage therapist job could potentially be disastrous

Job-related burnout is a disease.

Most professional publications usually attribute job-related burnout to constant stress. Today, I would like to discuss burnout in healthcare fields, especially among primary care physicians/family practitioners, as well as among massage therapists.

Currently, statistically, 75–90% of primary care visits are stress-related cases, such as anxieties, clinical depressions, foggy brain, sleep disorders, tension headaches, and fatigue, described by patients through physical and emotional exhaustions, mood swings, aggressiveness, and more. The practice of medicine has become a boring and repetitive exhausting routine. Physicians often refer to tests to exclude difficult diseases that can mimic stress-related disorders. However, most tests come back negative. This leads to prescribing medications, with some patients returning due to side effects or no positive affect, requiring and /or demanding subsequent prescriptions. Some patients are dissatisfied with treatment outcomes, blaming their doctors, some filing lawsuits. All this in addition ,to a routine of documentation, paperwork, including billing and coding, which we call bureaucratic tasks.

From time to time, I treat burned-out primary care physicians, as well as job-related burned out patients .What I have described above is a presentation of physicians and patients. In this pressured routine, physicians cannot engage in the art of clinical thinking or achieve results; instead, they often resort to routinely prescribing medications. They cannot practice medicine to see the results and outcomes of treatment. The bottom line is that this constant stress is the main reason for job-related burnout, a serious disease.

Recently, I had a discussion with a personal friend who is also my student and the owner of a medical massage center. He claimed that a major percentage of massage therapists are currently very busy due to massive stress explosions creating a sense of desperation within the general public—an urge to have a massage, to be touched, to feel better. We know that massage, could be considered as an a destructive therapy too. Even just rubbing someone's back, can be considered a therapeutic act, and people experiencing severe stress can derive some temporary therapeutic benefits from simple touch.

He also mentioned that because massage therapists are busy making money, they often neglect advancing their skills ,taking continued education classes, etc. My friend was very convincing, and I started to see a rational explanation. At the same time, he continued that if educators were to excite them with "new" using words like "new science" or "new findings," they would chase after false claims, attempting to distract from their desperation and burnout. I told , "You are describing a very dangerous phenomenon—a personal health-threatening phenomenon."

Although a destructive therapy containing the word "therapy" is impossible for a long time to be just a back rubber, providing temporary effective destructive therapy. To stay and to rub a client's body, sometimes out of desperation, to press vigorously without a real understanding of what you are doing, the goals of treatment, achieving sustainable results is impossible to survive for a long time as a massage therapist, as well as difficult to sustain personal health.

Most of our lives are spent in the workplace. Personal accomplishments, in our case, the ability to reproduce outcomes, are a must in order to make us happy. If after two to five years in practice, therapists burn out and leave this wonderful profession, the main and only reason is a lack of personal accomplishments. I personally wouldn’t survive even 1 year providing destructive therapy. Please consider, in the event that we do not traumatize our clients by vigorous pressure, some people temporary will react to destructive massage therapy, and then this patients will conclude:” I have tried massage therapy, it didn’t work” This is not an accomplishment; it is a way to burn out, disappointments, and health damages.

I have just shared my thoughts. Please post agreements or disagreements.