Why home massage?

Why do we get patients supplement our care with massage at home?

Most people with chronic (long standing) problems need more massage than they get from their professional

This is not due to some oversight by professionals. It because there is usually too much to do given normal economic and time constraints.

Let me explain.

At our clinic we deal with a lot of patients with chronic (long standing) musculoskeletal problems, such as backs, necks, shoulders etc. etc. In addition to the type of care I provide, these conditions often need large amounts of massage type treatment.

Why? The patient's muscular and soft tissue issues are usually quite extensive and to deal with them effectively (rather than just provide temporary relief) they usually require regular massage over a long period of time. When you multiply large amounts of muscular and soft tissue issues by large numbers of repetitions that can easily add up to 50-100 hours of massage over time.

What this means is unless you are someone with lots of spare time and cash, or a professional athlete who would have masseurs on tap, you never get all you need. The time and expense involved becomes prohibitive. Because of this, the muscular and soft tissue issues are reduced but not removed, and like weeds they come back again over time. It's a major reason why most patients never recover as they should, and one of the reasons most musculoskeletal problems tend to re-occur.

How do professionals normally deal with it?

Lets look at what happens now. Highly educated professionals who deal with musculoskeletal complaints generally don't have enough time and their fees per hour are too high to allow them to do more than the higher priority muscular and soft tissue problems. Therefore these issues are put in the "too hard" basket or more extensive work is referred out to masseurs or therapists. Masseurs and therapists do a great job, but it's still expensive and time consuming. Patient's usually discontinue long before all the issues are "cleaned up fully".

The solution? Getting patients to massage themselves

Some clinics use hand held massaging machines. The practitioner holds the massager in the right place and let it do the work. They're quite effective and actually much faster than hands on massage. However, why does the practitioner need to hold it? Why not let the patient hold it. Better still, why not give the patient their own machine, show them where to use it, and let them do it at home.

It seems so obvious but there was one problem. I've never heard of it being done before. We checked in the shops and the companies that supply things to practitioners, but found nothing we thought was suitable. The "professional" machines were very expensive (too much for most patients to buy) and were designed for practitioners to use on patients, not patients to use on themselves. The "consumer" machines like you buy in the shops were affordable and designed to use on oneself, but they were way short of the "professional" machines in power and effectiveness.

Despite this we prescribed supplementary home massage for our patients using the best compromise machines we could find.

The turning point: getting affordable affective machines

Eventually the best compromise machines went off the market, and there was nothing we found available that we were even remotely happy with. We'd developed a system for empowering patients to help themselves and it was working well, but (once my stockpile of compromise machines ran out) we had no appropriate massagers to supply them.

In a situation like that you have to do the best thing by your patients, and that meant finding something to do the job. We brought a few massagers on line, then eventually found this amazing web site where you can find manufacturers for just about anything you want. If you type in "massagers" you find over 28,000 products. Most aren't available here in Australia. We learnt how to read manufacturer's specification sheets and so forth to shortlist potential machines, then paid several overseas manufacturers to send samples.

We'd test them, get patients to use them, pull them apart to see how well they were built, and even paid an electrical safety consultant to make sure they would give a lifetime of safe use. The good news is that in a sea of cheap plastic buzz boxes we did find two machines that were very, very good. Not only were they easy to use and effective enough to do exactly what our patients needed, but in my opinion they are actually more effective than the "professional" machines that cost five to ten times as much. The manufacturers had done an amazing job, but there were a couple of small issues with each. The great thing about dealing directly with the factories is that they're most happy to make any improvements I suggested, as long as I ordered way more than I would ever hope to use myself.

You can have anything you want, as long as you buy a truck load

That's were we're at now. I've chosen to put in a sufficient order to get the best machines for my patients, and sell off the surplus to people such as yourselves. They've been chosen to be the best for our own patients, so you can be confident of getting a top quality highly affective machine to help handle your muscular problems.

The system works on good advice

In our clinic we check that it is safe to massage then instruct patients on the how when, where and how long. If you buy one of these machines you'll find on this web site plenty of audiovisuals and instructions on how to use them effectively. However, you'll still need some advice from your own professional with regards to safety and optimum use.

For when you do consult a professional we've provided downloadable paperwork they can use to make giving you advice easy. Also he or she is free to consult our professional section where one can download basically what we've learned over the last four years so no-one has to reinvent the wheel.

If you're a practitioner you may want to stock these for your patients. However, we are only making wholesale quantities to licensed health care professionals. I don't want people buying these and not getting professional advice.