One of the major obstacles for the massage practitioner to build productive professional relationship with physicians and other health practitioners and establish the successful referral base, is their frequent inability to explain the importance of massage in terms familiar to the Western educated doctors. In other words, we have a communication problem, and until this problem is solved massage therapy will remain on the outskirts of medicine instead of being an integrative part of the treatment of many somatic and visceral disorders.
Here, we strongly believe that need 
for the real scientific information about massage therapy is long overdue and it must be introduced to massage practitioners. It is time for the massage industry to rely on scientific data to convey correctly formulated message to the medical community and clients. In this issue we are starting the series of publications which will address this exact topic.
Using the world’s best scientific medical and massage sources (please see the caliber of publications this article is based on in the reference list at the end of the article) we will illustrate step by step to our readers how massage therapy affects the healthy and disease stricken body on the cellular, tissue and body levels by employing a variety of the healing factors. Pay attention to this and future articles because they will give enough scientifically based information to have unique leverage in any professional situation ranging from the interaction with physician or with fellow colleagues and students to explaining the benefits of the therapy to the client or patient.
Let’s hypothetically consider two scenarios when two massage practitioners are interviewed by a family physician who is looking to extend their practice and start to offer massage therapy as an integrative part of the standard care provided in the clinic. There are more and more family physicians who are looking for this opportunity. This is a great chance for the massage practitioner, because he or she will guarantee a very busy practice and frequently the office will do billing and communicate with insurance companies.
During the interview, the first practitioner explains his scope of work and justifies the necessary expertise by stressing his ability to balance the body’s energy and normalize the flow of the ‘Qi’ through the patient’s body.
The second practitioner based her expertise on the fact that the therapy she uses changes the bioelectricity in the soft tissue and consequently the entire patient’s body by generating piezoelectrical potentials and streaming potentials as two major healing factors. As you may agree, these are a quite different ways of explaining the healing impact of massage therapy.
The massage practitioner who works in his or her private clinic and would like to build up a referral base among local physicians will face a similar situation if he or she doesn’t have the ability to clearly explain the benefits of the therapy using scientific terminology of Western medicine.
Article from Science of Massage website here: http://www.scienceofmassage.com/