Well, we had our protest today in Sacramento. It was a busy day. We had several reporters come over and get massages and want to do stories. We massaged a horse from the California Highway Patrol, and we basically massaged until 5 30 pm way after we were
supposed to finish. The staff at the capitol wanted us to come back tomorrow but we are pretty tired at the moment.
Anyway, for those of you who have only been following The Freedom Ride for a short time let me reiterate what we are campaigning for. We are campaigning for deregulation of the massage industry and for health freedom in general.
Specifically with the massage industry we believe that massage is an art and it is an art that has evolved in different cultures of the world in different ways, with different underlying philosophies and with different techniques. For example a large part of Hawaiian massage is to massage with aloha, or from your heart. In Japan massage was traditionally done by blind people because they had a better sense of touch. In India massage was passed down from generation to generation to treat the family members.
In all of these styles as well as the many innovative styles of massage that seek to incorporate the best of these different massage styles and health philosophies such as Raynor Massage (
http://www.brandonraynor.com/) , they have different training methods and different aspects of knowledge that they consider important.
For example, The Wat Po temple in Bangkok (
http://www.watpomassage.com/ ), which is generally considered the philosophical and spiritual birthplace of Thai Massage has courses in Thai massage that cover 2 to 3 weeks. At the moment people trained there would not be allowed to practice in many states of the US due to to restrictive massage laws that say a person must study 500 or 1000 hours at a state regulated school. In these state regulated schools they
spend a lot
of the time studying anatomy and physiology and rote learning every
Latin name for a muscle. None of this training is relevant to Thai massage or Raynor massage, as our method is about hands on training and so is Thai massage and so is Hawaiian massage.
The first state to regulate massage from what I have been told was Hawaii and many native Hawaiians believe that this was an attempt to supress their native healing techniques or Ka Huna massage. The test which I had to take recently to get my massage licence in Hawaii was very theoretical and had almost nothing to do with what a real massage therapist needs to know especially not a Hawaiian massage therapist.
So what we are trying to do is deregulate the massage industry. The only regulation that there should be is that a person should pass a police background check to make sure they aren't sleazy and know what are the contraindications to massage. The rest should be left to market forces to regulate who is a good practitioner and who is not. The better practitioners will get repeat clientelle which is the only real way to succeeed in the massage business while the ones that are not very good won't. That is how the massage industry is regulated in most parts of the world such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, many parts of Europe and many parts of Asia and the rest of the world.
So that in a nutshell is pretty much what we are calling for - deregulation of the massage industry. For more informtion about why the massage industry got regulated and the people that profit from it being regulated please see
http://www.healingandlaw.com/Massage_Law_Newsletter/massage_law_newsletter.html
