Disseminating, ruminating, analyzing, thinking. The CIM conference part I

Yes.....it's all of the above with regards to the Massage Therapy Research in CIM conference.

I'm not going to blog about the whole conference in one post. It would be too long. Instead I'm going to divide the info from it up into chunks and give different perspectives into the what-I-got-from-it package.

The post-conference calm has brought on a flood of thoughts on many different things. How does all this information relate to my practice? How am I going to change from it? Will I change or make new plans for my practice? How has my attitude to massage therapy research been affected? What role do I play as a massage therapist in public health? What about the profession as a whole?

From the small picture to the big and back to the small again - my head has been going all over the place and I've been writing things down (I do that to try to sort stuff out) and I just thought I'd share with you some of the things that I'm thinking of doing that have come from all this. These are some of the things that I've written and a basic reasoning on why I've written them down in my wee book of "stuff to do"

.

* Accelerate own learning/understanding of research literacy - promote it.

I was on board with this point before the conference and I knew that there is a major hole in my (and overall in the profession) education, but the last keynote speaker drove it home for me. Whitney Lowe gave a great presentation on taking the knowledge we gain from research, applying it and the reasons why we need to pay attention to it. He covered all the challenges that arise from trying to become familiar with research. It can be information overload for us. There is a lot to take in. He also covered the responsibility of our educators to become research literate and the importance of education. The guy blew me away. The keynote speakers were filmed. Hopefully the MTF will make these available at some stage and if that happens, everyone should watch his presentation. No one will be left thinking "What's the point?" after viewing it. I'm going to keep on learning about research. This means tackling statistics (which is maybe going a bit overboard, but it appeals to me) and getting to the level where I'm comfortable looking at research, not just from an understanding of the types of studies, levels of evidence that comes from the type of study (I've gained some familiarilty with that just by reading books about it), but I want to become really comfortable with looking at research with a critical eye. It was interesting to hear one researcher be critical of another researcher's work in one of the sessions. I emphasize work since this is totally different from criticizing the person. One PhD being critical of another PhD's work for not having enough data is kind of cool! Apparently this is not unusual occurence in the world of research, and know what? It shouldn't be unusual for us as a profession to do that either.

* Marketing claims/website. Clean up - investigate

This is a practical application. I'd cleaned up my site a little a while back, but I need to do more investigation on the claims on it. By the way, if any of you have the "massage reduces cortisol" claim on your website or anywhere else, you may want to rethink it. Doc Moyer presented information on his work (yet to be published - it's in review at the minute), which to me pretty much put the cortisol claim in the proverbial toilet. His study was a quantitative review of multiple studies, doing between-group analyses (pretty dang important - this is basically the whole reasoning behind a control group to me) and the result might surprise you. I'm not going to go on about it - we'll get to read about it more when the the study is published - and I'll blog about it.

* FASCIA. FASCIA. FASCIA.

It's all about the fascia, folks, for sure. Everything from Julie Ann Day's presentation on Stecco's (if you've never heard of Day or Stecco, read this) work to ...CONTINUE