Oncology Massage

An integrative approach to cancer care

Janet Penny, Rebecca Sturgeon

• Publisher: Handspring Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781912085767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

In Oncology Massage – an integrative approach to cancer care the authors have created a textbook which will provide both experienced and inexperienced therapists with a resource to expand their knowledge and understanding of working with people with cancer. Cancer occurrence and survivorship are now so common that every massage therapist will at some time work with clients who have been through cancer treatment. The short and long-term effects of biomedical cancer treatment require massage therapy adaptations to pressure, site, position and duration to provide safe and effective treatments. Informed massage therapists can support the body to promote overall wellness as well as identify the underlying secondary effects of cancer treatment that contribute to physical dysfunction.

Oncology Massage: An Integrative Approach to Cancer Care provides massage therapists with essential information for:

• Treatment planning based on the physiology of cancer and cancer treatments
• Critical, thoughtful treatment decision making
• Consideration of the psychosocial effects of cancer
• Enhancing therapist self-awareness and building a therapeutic relationship.

The information is presented in a clear and simple format with plentiful use of illustrations and information boxes which allows it to be used both as a learning tool for those new to the field of oncology massage and as a resource for quick referral when working with new patients.

The techniques of massage therapy change very little; it is the knowledge and understanding of their use that distinguishes a massage therapist. Oncology Massage is unusual in that it includes contributions not only from a range of experienced practitioners but also from people with cancer who have received massage during and after cancer treatment. This feedback from clients provides an invaluable addition to the understanding of how massage can be used as a safe and effective part of cancer care.

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Treatment considerations, and oncology massage through the life cycle

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

•A brief history of massage therapy in health care.

•A brief history of the beginnings of oncology massage.

•Introduction to the team/integrative approach to oncology care.

•The definition and importance of evidence-based care.

•Fitting into the health care team.

•Principles for adapting massage therapy to treatment considerations: pressure, site, position, duration.

•Introductory considerations for pediatric and geriatric oncology massage.

Massage in health care

Massage therapy has been practiced, in some form, all over the world for thousands of years. In the Western world, massage was long viewed as separate from biomedical practice. As an “alternative” or “complementary” practice, massage struggled at times to gain legitimacy among biomedical health care practitioners. In recent years, massage therapists have begun to codify the benefits of massage, and employ research as a tool to establish documentation of the results of massage therapy. In addition, recent and past research explores the question of when and how massage is a safe intervention, and how it can be used to treat certain symptoms or conditions.

As massage therapy becomes more integrated into health care, it becomes even more imperative for massage therapists to have a thorough understanding not only of their own work, but also of how that work fits into a person’s overall health picture. The massage therapist who practices in isolation, with no contact or communication with other professionals, is becoming an antiquated notion.

This can only benefit the massage profession as we explore new professional collaborations and find ways to serve people who may not have experienced massage before. Our collaborations increase our knowledge of the human body, and of the ways in which health care professionals work. As the profession advances, our challenge becomes keeping our knowledge and skills in line with our opportunities. Basic massage training may not suffice for therapists who wish to work in a hospital or clinical setting, or for those who want to serve individuals whose medical history may be complex. With the increased acceptance of massage therapy in the medical field, the need for additional training grows. This is very apparent for massage therapists working with those who have a history of cancer treatment. As we will explore in Chapter 3, the incidence of cancer is so common that it is guaranteed that a therapist will encounter someone who has a cancer history in their career. The disease itself is complex, as is the treatment.

Although general clinical skills and critical thinking can take a therapist a long way toward creating the most safe and effective massage for each client, with a disease as complex as cancer, additional specialized knowledge is necessary. In this book, we seek to provide therapists with that specialized knowledge, along with a greater understanding of cancer and cancer treatment in an integrated context. We hope that therapists will understand that cancer is not a monolithic disease – rather that it affects the body, mind, and spirit of each person differently.

History of oncology massage

Some therapists working today may remember a time when they were told that massage spreads cancer, and that people who are in cancer treatment should not receive massage of any kind. Fortunately, this belief is now almost completely extinct among health care professionals, having been invalidated by better understanding of how massage affects the body, as well as of how cancer starts and spreads.

The shift began, as most shifts do, with critical thinking. Massage therapists recognized parallels between standard biomedical practice for cancer patients and the impact of massage. For example, most cancer patients are advised to move and exercise within their tolerance limits throughout their treatment. As massage therapists recognized that massage alone would not cause an increase in systemic circulation anything like that which happens in a moving body (even a slowly or minimally moving body), they understood that massage could not spread cancer by increasing systemic circulation. (In Chapter 3, we will consider the question of massage and circulation in more detail.)

Gayle MacDonald interview

In February 2020, Rebecca Sturgeon sat down to talk with Gayle MacDonald about the history of oncology massage. This is a summary of their conversation.

Gayle MacDonald, author of Medicine Hands, and pioneer in the field of oncology massage, talks about her start in the field as part of a movement that started in the Bay Area of California in the 1980s. She points out that oncology massage is related very closely to the work Irene Smith was doing with AIDS patients in the 1980s, many of whom developed some form of cancer. At around the same time, Teri Dunne and Marion Williams ran a program at the California Pacific Medical Center as part of the Planetree philosophy of care. Gayle also points out that Dawn Nelson’s work with elders and hospital-based massage in the 1980s and 1990s was very influential.

In 1993, Gayle worked with a group of massage therapy students in the externship program at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). She brought the students to offer massages to cancer patients through the volunteer services office. For Gayle, much of the initial resistance to providing massage therapy to people living with cancer came from massage therapists, not from other health care professionals. She states, “Massage has always been part of standard nursing care.”

In those early days, Gayle developed guidelines using information from the American Cancer Society and recommendations from a nurse mentor, as well as her own clinical reasoning about cancer and the process of metastasis. The student externship program eventually grew into some local classes for massage therapists. Eventually, Gayle offered her first oncology massage intensive course the weekend of September 11, 2001.

In 2007, Gayle MacDonald and Tina Ferner organized the first Oncology Massage Healing Summit in the United States. The summit was held in Toledo, Ohio where Gayle and Tina brought together about 160 professionals to learn and present about the benefits and practice of oncology massage. By this time, practitioners across the country were already working with cancer patients. They were, for the most part, learning as they went. The summit in 2007 started a forum for practitioners to share their best practices and to define what they were doing.

Of her work in oncology massage, Gayle states, “I didn’t seek this out. I love our tribe. Whatever my work, it’s because of the people. We are a community. We may be disparate, but we are a community.”

From this beginning, the understanding of cancer and cancer treatments as well as the understanding of massage itself, have grown exponentially. Through directed research and collaboration with other professionals, we have arrived now at a deeper and richer understanding of the application and potential of oncology massage.

Tracy Walton interview

In November 2019, Rebecca Sturgeon sat down for a conversation with Tracy Walton to talk about the beginnings and the future of oncology massage. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

TW: When I went to massage school (1988–90), I was taught that massage might spread cancer. There was some murkiness about remission and how long you should wait before massaging people after treatment, but, for the most part, a hands-off approach prevailed.

Then I remember reading Debra Curties’ article, “Can massage therapy promote cancer metastasis?” in 1993. That was the first explicit challenge to prevailing belief that I remember. It opened up work for us. It was one of the first contributions to the literature that would eventually become the field of Oncology Massage Therapy.

At the time, I had been developing my own approach to work with my clients with cancer and cancer histories. I was working at the intersection of my clients, some doctors, Debra Curties’ important work, and my own thought process about different medical conditions. I eventually came up with a couple of different decision tree models for sorting out what to do.

At first, I considered: what is the client’s problem list and what does each problem mean for massage therapy? That was the beginning of bringing massage therapy into its different elements, like pressure, speed, duration, etc. In the late 1990s, I met Gayle MacDonald and her brilliant system of pressure/site/position, and that intersected really well with my thinking, and it moved us all into a more comprehensive way of thinking about our work, away from a modality-based approach.

There are a lot of different ways to break down the thinking process and isolate the important issues. For cancer, I use signs and symptoms, complications, tissue stability, organ function, treatment, and effects of treatment. That’s my way to sort it out,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the authors
• Foreword by Cal Cates
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Treatment considerations, and oncology massage through the life cycle
• 2. Integrative cancer care
• 3. Cancer and metastasis
• 4. Research
• 5. Introduction to oncology massage treatments
• 6. Surgery
• 7. Chemotherapy
• 8. Radiation therapy
• 9. Immunotherapy
• 10. Hormone therapies
• 11. The lymphatic system
• 12. Intake
• 13. Therapeutic relationship/The impact of massage on the massage therapist
• 14. Cancer and emotional health
• 15. Massage at the end of life
• 16. Oncology massage around the world
• Permissions
• Index