M. Braxton Massage Therapy

Living in "The City By the Bay" Can Be a

Real Pain...

in your legs, in your back, in your neck.

Why, you ask?

Calves, Stressed-out Over-Worked Calves

Our unique topography put us in the postion to walk, ride our bikes, and climb to our favorite cafe/bookstore/yoga studio at an incline, all the while your calves aren't getting a break. Uneven ground puts a huge strain on our Achilles' Tendon thus affecting the muscle that make up the calf. Fatigue alone can cause cramps, knots, burning, and tightness. Over-worked calves causes an adjustment in posture to compensate for the limited ability of our stressed out calves, ultimately resulting in leg pain, lower/mid/upper back pain and neck pain which can lead to headaches, earaches, migraines. This is where I come in.

(excerpt)

The Healing Power of Touch

On Nov. 1, 1985, a 56-year-old woman who had lived in the English countryside around Oxford for most of her life arrived in distress at the Radcliffe Infirmary, the hospital that first began treating Oxford's ill in the 1700s. The woman, known as Mrs. Headley, had suffered a terrible stroke. When physicians looked at a scan of her brain, they found that its right hemisphere had infarcts, areas of tissue that was dead because of a failure of blood supply.

(See a quick guide to alternative treatments.)

Because the brain's right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, Headley couldn't move her left arm or hand. She was transferred to Rivermead Rehabilitation Centre, but its staff could do little for her. And yet an experimental psychologist from Oxford University, Lawrence Weiskrantz, took an interest in her case.

Most of the time, stroke patients are given a simple stimulation test to measure how much feeling remains. A little fibrous device called von Frey hairs is applied to the skin; Headley, like most severe-stroke patients, didn't feel the von Frey hairs on her left side at any level of intensity.

But then, during a break between tests, Weiskrantz noticed that Headley was rubbing her insensate hand with her normal right hand. When asked why, she quietly — but insistently — said that even though no other object produced sensation in her left hand, she could feel her right hand when it touched the left. The doctors tested her by pretending her right hand was touching the left when it wasn't. Throughout the testing, Headley knew more often than not when her right hand was returning sensation to her left.

The 1987 paper that Weiskrantz and his colleague Daren Zhang wrote about Headley has become a seminal document in the emerging science of nondrug healing. This science can be said to begin with a simple question: What's the first thing you do when you burn your hand on the stove? Put it under a faucet? Reach for ice? Actually, the first thing most people do is reflexively grasp the hurt hand with the other one. Scientists have known since at least the '60s that this kind of self-touch reduces pain. If you try to keep your other hand away, you will hurt a lot more.

Last year, researchers in three countries demonstrated in a Current Biology paper that simple touch can minimize complex central pain. They used a method called the thermal-grill illusion to prove their point.

The thermal-grill illusion was a quirky choice because it is best known as a 19th century carnival act. Subjects are asked to touch a very warm object — say, a heated but not scorching grill — and then, right afterward, a cool or room-temperature grill. Quite reliably, the participants' brains fool them into believing the second object is excruciatingly hot, even though nothing has happened to their flesh. Today we know that burning sensation as central pain.

(See TIME's health and medicine covers.)

The Current Biology team replicated the illusion in a lab experiment using water. Study participants immersed their index and ring fingers in 109°F (39°C) water and their middle fingers in 57°F (14°C) water. As in the original illusion, their middle fingers felt significantly hotter than they really were. The scientists then had participants repeat the experiment with their right fingers only. Immediately after, the subjects used the same three fingers on their left hand to touch the wet fingers on the right hand. This mere touch caused a 64% reduction in self-reported pain scores on a scale of 1 to 100.

Touch is at the core of many CAM therapies, but scientists aren't sure exactly how it works. One theory is that the healing power of touch is an evolutionary response: our ancestors had few remedies for a cut hand other than grasping it until their fellow hunter-gatherers could fashion a poultice from mud or yak dung. This evolutionary impulse may have encoded a placebo response in later generations: we came to expect that touch would reduce pain, and so we report less pain. It's also possible that evolution encoded an actual decrease in pain signals — either the number of signals or their intensity (or both) — when touch is applied to a wound.

The biological mechanics of how touch might work to reduce pain were explored in a compelling study published in September in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The lead author, Dr. Mark Hyman Rapaport, chief of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, found that even a single deep-tissue Swedish-massage session resulted in a significant decrease in the hormone arginine vasopressin (AVP). AVP constricts blood vessels and raises blood pressure, both of which can cause agitation and spikes in pain. The study also showed that either massage or light-touch therapy produced reductions in levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with higher levels of pain that is released when people are stressed.

Intrigued that massage could have such immediate biological effects, I asked Rapaport if I could undergo the same procedure as the 53 study participants. After giving two samples of blood to serve as a baseline, I was worked over (not too strenuously) by a massage therapist for 45 minutes. A sound machine issued the gentle music of ocean waves. And then the bad part: six more blood draws over one hour.

(See Healthland's five new rules for good health in 2011.)

I found the whole experience stressful, partly because I was reporting but mostly because a large needle was shoved into the soft crease of my arm the whole time. That's why my results surprised me: my levels of cortisol declined by a stunning 56%. The massage therapist also rubbed away a huge amount of my AVP; it went from 85 picograms per milliliter to 59. Not bad for 45 minutes of massage — although without follow-up tests, it's not clear how long the benefits lasted.

Does this mean we should get a massage every day? Every week? "The jury is still out on dosage," Rapaport told me. But he recommends "occasional" massages.

His study needs to be replicated, but it offers an explanation for why so many people seek massage to reduce neck, back and joint pain. Other studies are finding that other kinds of touch — even just placing both hands on different areas of a patient's body — can reduce pain. A 2008 Annals of Internal Medicine paper reported the results of a trial involving 380 advanced-cancer patients with moderate-to-severe pain. The authors — a team from Florida Atlantic University and the University of Colorado Denver — randomly assigned participants to receive either six 30-minute massages over two weeks or six control sessions in which a therapist placed both hands on 10 different areas of the body for three minutes each.

The study found that touch of either kind was associated with statistically significant improvements in pain reports with very few side effects. The authors point out that one reason pain may decline with touch is that healthy people have an aversion to touching sick people, so those who are ill get fewer hugs and less hand holding. Under this theory, isolation literally hurts, and though it's a bit treacly to say, a hug can heal.

Why Group Coupons and Deal Of the Day Marketing is ruining small time Massage Providers and Independent Contract Massage Therapists and how to behave when said service is redeemed

We're all guilty of it, we're all pleased by it. Our guilty pleasure. The one day only limited amount offer at a steal. $35 for a $75 service. $20 dollars for only $10 of food at... 2 dozen x for the price of 1 dozen.

An discount that seems too good to be true, virtually harmless, right?

Wrong, the person who suffers is your privately owned small business and heart and soul of this great country.It is a classic trickle-down effect. Here's the way it works:

It's September a Five Star Hotel is experience a slump in attendance to their Five-Star Spa. They want to attract new clients in the financial slump. But don't want to pay an exorbitant amount for a marketing campaign that very well may end in meager results. Since they are a Five-Star Spa the price of their 60 massage is 115% mark up on the average pedestrian massage at a privately owned day spa, or a single person operated massage business. (i.e. Where a CMT is renting a space to provided excellent massages to a small client base.) A Group Coupon site has already been calling just often enough to see Five-Star Spa want to advertise, but it was summer and things were alive with tourism, now things have slowed down and so has the spa which has ground nearly to a halt. The spa has experienced this after summer slump every year. It's the ebb and flow of the business, but 3 weeks go by and paranoia sets in Deal of the Day marketing looks like a good idea. For nearly half of the profits DOTD will send direct emails to their 30,000 subscribers offering 45% of the massage limiting the amount to only an exclusive 430 coupons. Expected to run over the course of a weekend it burns like wildfire selling out in half a day. Slump resolved, Five-Star Spa reduces the commission rate of their bodyworkers when providing service for Group Coupon holders by 5%. On Average a Five-Star Spa offers 15-20% commission of the full listed price.

October rolls in, The masses are used to the old grind of all work, and no play, they are weary, weak and unrested, but the economic down-turn has limited their funds. They may have a regular bodywork practitioner, but their spouse/partner/best friend has bought them a coupon for a Five Star Spa, so they seize the opportunity to experience something they may never have . Bad news for MOM & POP Massage. All their regular clients have ran off to one of the many Five-Star Spas to have date with an upper crust decadence.

A Group Coupon site has offered to market a deal of the day to help MOM & POP Massage. They set the limit at 150 that should keep them busy for a month or so. The coupon is sold out in 24 hours. MOM and POP MAssage are elated, their bodyworkers aren't. Since the discount is roughly 50% off the listed price, the commission they pay their massage therapist is cut as well. They simply cannot take less than $20 off the meager $40 per every other massage they will get from the group coupon company. So now each massage therapist, while busy has to work twice as hard to make the same amount of money. Full days await them, as does fatigue, because of the reduced rate paid the tips also go down. Now a massage therapist who was making $40 a massage plus a $10 tip. is making $20 a massage and a $5 tip. Or no tip at all. The idea is to get repeat customers BUT why would they pay the full price for a massage when they can just wait till the next spa deal? The retention rate is less than .5%. so out of 150 people who come in less than 7.5 of them will be retained. Not to mention the people who bought more than one deal. How, then does MOM & POP make this lucrative? There are many solutions.

My background is in the hotel industry. When sites like expedia.com came to light and began offering a huge discount on hotel stays we had to hanker down an get crafty. We started offering our own discounts. We honored the site discounts directly to cut out the middle man. We gradually increased prices, so the value of the room seemed like a good deal. We sold blocks of rooms to be able to charge last minute travelers an inflated rate. WE over sold to refer to a partner hotel, at an industry discount on our tab. So we still made a profit.

MOM and POP should take that influx of cash and promote their spa in the way they wanted. LIMIT the number of GROUP Coupon holders can book in a day. Dont forget about your regular customers. Group Coupons and Deal of the Day Marketers should offer other options flush that cash back into their business and perhaps allow clients to be featured when the deal is sold out. If you work retail and make 10 dollars an hour and due to circumstance your boss puts a promotion out resulting in your pay being cut by half so for the same amount of work you get paid 5 dollars you do not care how busy you are. You care about money, bills, making ends meet, It is insulting to assume that busy equates to success. Twice as much work for half the pay is despicable.