What is it that we do with our hands?
That is the topic of a month long online conference with the International Consortium of Manual Therapists. Massage therapists, Physical Therapists, Osteopaths, Structural Integrators and Chiroprators from around the World have been meeting for two years in an effort to define just that…what is it that we do with our hands.
“(Taken from their first newsletter they sent participants.)The primary goals of the first half of the ICMT inaugural conference’s main session are to:
- Report and evaluate common treatment models used by clinicians and
educators within each profession and to describe and compare the clinicians’
rationale for why their treatments work, in other words, potential mechanisms
of action. - Evaluate the nomenclature each profession uses to describe key
aspects of their techniques with the long-term goal of promoting a more
explicitly descriptive, science-based nomenclature to facilitate communication
and understanding of manual therapy interventions”
“THE OUTCOME IS FOR PARTICIPANTS to establish better communication within and between
manual therapy professions and basic scientists and consider the value of and begin developing a unifying nomenclature with more objective description of what the hands do during therapies. Understanding our lexicons and unifying key terms will assist in translation of research outcomes into practice and to translate practice insights to basic scientists to help shape future research. By comparing and contrasting clinician and educators’ rationales for therapeutic responses from manual therapies, we will better learn how similar or different manual therapy professions are and be able to update those models based on the latest evidence investigating manual therapies mechanisms of action which will be described and discussed during the second half of the main program.” (Taken from their first newsletter they sent participants.)
The Massage Therapy Documents are open for all to view AND comment on even if you are not attending the conference. Start with the Read first document and then look at the Scope of Practice Document, technique descriptions and the Glossary of Terms. You can also still register for the conference and view last weekends presentations in full and attend the rest of the conference which last for the rest of the month until June, 3, 2022. Here is the full schedule.
So after working on the definitions and outlining what it is that we think we do with our hands, scientists (not sure who exactly —people that are at the conference or people that are hired by the conference) will look at the research and see if it says the same thing.
My Notes
I am taking notes and posting them on my Facebook Page and sharing it with as many groups as I can. This is important! I will try to organize them in posts here after the conference too.
This week is the topic of the History of Manual Therapies and the Skeletons in the Closet. Massage therapy has a few big ones like how it came to be that so many prostitutes came to be using massage as a front for prostitution…how the moving to more treatment based techinques in CE classes takes us away from our roots as whole body practitioners and there may be a bit of Massage therapists wanna be more…Physical therapists, Osteopaths…etc.
What they were unable to convey in their marketing messaging.
When I first heard about this from Sandy Fritz, I was not quite sure what it was about. Because there is such a small group of people working on creating the conference and most were scientists/tech people, some things were left out of their marketing messaging which I think is important.
This is not just a conference…it is the beginning of a new association – International Consortium of Manual Therapists. People attending the conference get a one year membership to this association that is being formed.
This is the first of many conferences to come.
The result of this conference will be a white paper of some sort to put everything together to be presented to all professions.
There was some profession involved who dropped out for some reasons (they didn’t say who or why but my guess would be that it is soooo challenging to work together.) Could other professions become involved? Acupunturists and Athletic Trainers come to mind.
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