How can you teach Orthopedic Massage online?

• My workshop courses emphasize hands-on technique. I demonstrate scientifically-based assessment and treatment methods, explain the physiology behind their use, and then students practice those techniques. These techniques contribute to your professional bag of tools. Techniques workshops are best for learning the hands-on skills. However, a skilled craftsman is good not only because of the tools he or she uses, but because of their knowledge of how, when, where and why to use those tools. While we can get into some of this in the workshop, there simply is not the time and it is simply not the environment to go into truly in-depth study of conditions and their treatment. That is why I created the online program.

• My online courses emphasize the “how, when, and why” of assessment and treatment. These are cognitive skills – skills that require the clinician to think through their client’s particular representation of symptoms, discriminate between similar problems, and come up with a treatment plan that makes physiological sense. Clinical reasoning and rehabilitation science are learned far more successfully in the online environment than a hectic weekend workshop.

• Do you need this type of training? Do your clients ask you to treat a particular problem? Do they have pain that has not gone away and want you to figure it out? Do they expect particular results? If you answer yes, then you will need an educated process of determining an effective treatment approach. High quality therapeutic massage treatment goes beyond cookie-cutter recipes and requires clinical thinking.

• Effective treatments consider many aspects of anatomy, biomechanics, and pathology. These are best taught by applying the concepts, rather than memorizing them. And they are best taught when you have the time and space to reflect on the scenario.  Workshops simply cannot accommodate this style of learning.

• Making clinical decisions is called clinical reasoning and it is an often neglected, but essential aspect of being a skillful clinician. Therapeutic, clinical, or orthopedic massage is as much a cognitive, clinical thinking process as it is hands-on skill. Clinical reasoning – or rather, critical reasoning or analysis – is the cognitive process that takes you way beyond rote treatments to being truly connected with your client and able to determine a successful solution to their problem.

• I take your education one step further…they take you all the way through a client case, from initial interview to treatment plan. Thus, when you begin to work with your new skills in the clinic you have essentially ‘practiced‘ several cases already. This way, you do not wind up fumbling around trying to figure out how to apply the materials.
• Finally, in these courses I am personally involved in your studies and actually review your responses. You have a rare opportunity to actually interface with a national provider and get feedback.