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Robotic Massage
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Shane Pisani
- Dip RM, Dip YTT, Dip BA
- Forum Administrator
- November 01, 2007 2:37pm
- Discussion categories: Massage
Mankind is getting ridiculously good at robotics. As a result, we are now seeing some advanced massage chairs come on the market. The question is raised – will mechanical therapy ever replace human touch? Of course it will. Just look at the path of every form of medicine over the past 20 years. First aid went from hands on to defibrillation machines. Surgery went from having steady hands, to being good at robotics. Psychologists now develop software to interpret electronic signals from the body, and spend less time with clients. Naturopaths spend less time asking questions, and more time with bioresonance machines. Acupuncture spawned laser acupuncture. Physiotherapists use machines daily for a myriad of soft tissue work. In fact, the last time mechanical treatment was obsoleted came with the fall of electroshock therapy. So be warned that massage therapy as the sole domain of humans has a limited lifespan.
To be clear, i’m not talking about using a handheld tool to replace fingers or elbows, or the $200 dodgy vibrating chair covers. When I say robotics, I mean a chair that obtains feedback about the body sitting in it and responds accordingly, treating all the major muscle groups and many smaller ones. A chair with thousands of programs, all safe enough and versatile enough to work without human supervision, and which plays music for the client into the bargain. Currently such chairs retail for around $9,000 and are a long way away from the service provided by even your untrained partner, let alone a qualified practitioner, but eventually they will improve.
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HI Shane
Being a very qualified physiotherapist i would debate human touch will ever be replaced by machines. Even the reseaerch has proven postgraduate Masters Physios in Manipulative Physiotherapy can identify anatomical levels in the spine with comparable accuracy to local anaesthetic nerve blocks to identify levels of concern.
John’s comments about Physios not using massage any more really depends on which physio you go to see. There are a number of clinics around that do admittedly put clients on machines for prolonged periods and this serves no help to our profession as the research shows no evidence for this form of therapy where manual therapy combined with exercise therapy is superior to all other treatments practised by physios.
I do hope you have at least one physio you can refer to who adopts an evidence based approach to treatment and likes getting results in their treatment without machines. Diagnostic ultrasound has gone a long way in helping us undertatnd the role of the deep core muscles (transversus abdominus and multifidus) in low back pain but who can, or will, afford to have one in their homes in the future as even the cheapest machines around now lack quality compared with the more expensive ones. You get what you pay for and that can be true for physiotherapy. The clinics that provide machine therapy are often those who are the cheapest around as they can afford to see 4-5 patients an hour provided these clients come back. Clients should vote with their feet that this is not an acceptable from a common sense viewpoint that results are not achieved with machines without a good clinician clinically reasoning how to fix the problem long term and stop it coming back. This cant be done in 10 mins and these clinics never spend more than 10 mins per consultation.
I employ two full time massage therapists in our clinic and without their combined skills and our other exercise and manual techniques we wouldnt get the fast results we can achieve with many clients.
Lets hope we all can promote the hands on manual therapy amongst all therapies and encourage united and combined problem solving in helping clients get the results they deserve in our hands as a team like Physio on Brunswick practice. Lets also encourage more cross promotion and use the skills we are particularly specialised in and leave the designated therapies, i.e. from my point of view, massage, to those who do it all day every day so that other therapies can focus on areas other havent been trained. We will get the best results. PAIN FREE FOR LIFE is our motto.
An interesting question to ponder....but no, I don’t think the human touch will ever be replaced by robotic machines - no matter how advanced they may become in the future. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure most of us will be grateful fto have the opportuniity to have machines in our own homes for self-treatment, but rather to use in conjunction with a therapist and not to replace the therapist. I believe that it is our nature that we will always have the need to be nurtured, touched, cared for and sociable - with other human beings, not robotic machines.
Leonie
Shane, Robotics will hopefully not replace the human touch, look what happen to the Physios they use to massage now they hardly have any hands on exposure. They just tell them to stretch or use a machine. More time with your client is importent than more time with machines.
Shane, you are correct with one thing. Mechanical therapy will improve and probably amaze us all in the future. But mechanical therapy will NEVER replace human touch.
Chris