Being an Effective Massage Therapy Educator with Whitney Lowe

In this episode I welcome Whitney Lowe who is a massage therapist from Sisters Oregon. He has been a leader in high quality massage therapy education in the US for almost 30 years. In this episode we focus on the importance of providing effective massage therapy education at both the entry to practice level as well as for experienced clinicians through continuing education.

We both are realistic with the difficulties of providing evidence-based education that differs from the mainstream modality empires. Our focus as educators is knowledge translation which inspires critical thinking.

This was such a great conversation that could have lasted for hours! I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.


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Transcript

0:08  
Hello and welcome to the purpose vs podcast. My name is Eric Purves. I am an RMT course creator, continuing education provider and advocate for evidence based massage therapy. Thank you for being here today. In this episode, I welcome Whitney Lowe, who is a massage therapist from assisters, Oregon. Whitney has been a leader in high quality massage therapy education in the US for almost 30 years. And this episode, we focus on the importance of providing effective massage therapy education at both the entry to practice level, as well as for experienced clinicians through continuing education during this episode, and I hope you have as much fun listening to it as we did recording it. Well, hello, everybody. I'm excited to have the wonderful Whitney Lowe here. Some of you might know him. He is a massage therapist based in Sisters, Oregon, and from those of US and Canada who don't have any idea where that is, is about three hours from Portland. And some of you may know what Neetu from his podcast, which he does called the thinking practitioner and your co host on that is a name that I'm never going to say correctly. So you can correct me who that is. But thanks so basically Luca.

1:13  
Say again, it's Luca till Luca

1:17  
and Luca. Okay, thank you. I should have asked you that before we started recording. But yeah, thanks for being here, when you just tell us a little bit more about yourself. Yeah, so

1:27  
thank you again, first of all, for the invitation to be here and to chat with you. This is always a great opportunity to chat and get into some goodies. But yeah, I've been a massage therapist about 35 years, originally trained down in Atlanta, Georgia. And that's where I did my initial training and did some graduate work down there in sports medicine and biomechanics, as well as in psychology, and eventually found my way back out here to the Great Pacific Northwest in the US ended up here in Oregon in the mid 90s and had been primarily focused on clinically working with pain and injury conditions. I did some work back in Atlanta in a couple of physical therapy and chiropractic clinics, but also a really good stint in Orthopaedic Clinic that was affiliated with Emory University Medical School back in Atlanta, and got real interested in pain and injury conditions in sort of the world of Orthopaedics. But also was teaching in massage school at that time and recognising those two things were kind of coming together, there was a wealth of information out there that I thought would really help massage therapists. And they didn't have easy access to a lot of that content. So I got very involved with education and producing educational materials and training programmes and and that eventually morphed into online programmes and other kinds of resources, books and DVDs, videos, and all that kind of stuff. So that's been my sort of primary focus for the last couple of decades is trying to get the word out and information out and help other people to help other people.

2:56  
That's great when and it's such a common thing, too, that a lot of us that are getting the education, that are trying to be educators as we, we tend to have this desire, like we have all this information that we just want people to know. Yeah, just trying to give it to people because we have this belief, or this knowledge. If you learn this stuff, you're gonna help more people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's such a thing that an honourable thing that, you know, I think that we need more RMT or empty educators out there that are willing to deliver really good quality stuff. Yeah. And

3:30  
and, you know, I think that gets into another issue about this, which is and this Sunland didn't mention is that, you know, for the last probably, I don't know, 1015 years, my emphasis has been not only on you know, continuing to work on learning more about this whole field and the things that we're doing, but I've become extremely passionate about learning science and trying to learn how to be a good educator. Because I think, you know, many of us have probably experienced that, too, is, you know, going into courses or classes or things like that with somebody who you heard was, you know, really knowledgeable, knew a lot of stuff. But it turns out, they're not quite a great teacher. And a lot of people don't realise that that's a very separate skill set. Not just being a really good clinician. And being a good teacher, those two things are not the same. And so I'm also super passionate about trying to find ways to build better learning experiences for students so that they can get more out of the things that we're doing.

4:27  
It's hard, being an educator and being a good educator, because it's not easy. You can have all the knowledge in your head. But if you can't translate that to people that are paying to take your stuff, then it's kind of lost. I know my own journey. I started you know, teaching just because I did information. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I'll admit that if anyone took take two courses, I started teaching about eight, nine years ago, it was just here's the information. Yeah. And I even now two years starting, you know, he started teaching things. Oh my gosh, I can't believe I used to teach that I can leave, I used to say those things, I can't leave. That's how I thought people were going to get this information. You can't just throw you can't just vomit knowledge on people, you have to get them to engage with it. Yes, that's the that's the that's the art, isn't it?

5:13  
It is. And you know, what's fascinating to me about this is that, you know, we look at the we teach, oftentimes the way we were taught, and this goes back to not just in massage therapy school, but of course, through our own elementary and secondary education systems, which is primarily about one person transmitting information to a large group of people. And it is, you know, at least based on the way the traditional classroom has been set up for the last couple of 100 years, one pace fits all in one activity, like one person talking, and that's the pace at which the information is presented. And that's the content that gets delivered to to everybody in the classroom. But people learn so many different ways. And it's such different rates and paces. And the idea of, you know, I would be standing in the classroom talking to people and you know, give them what I thought was some really good, great content, great delivery. And, you know, you say, Hey, does anybody have any questions, and nobody raises their hand. So like, good, everybody must get that. And then we go do an activity, where I want them to apply what we just learned, and they're looking at me like deer in the headlights. And that was a real eye opening experience for me of recognising that, you know, they might have heard it the first time, they might even have thought they understood it. But that doesn't mean necessarily, it's anchored into a good long term memory or good working memory to be able to be accessed so that they can really do something with it. And that's, that's what kind of spurred me to start looking a lot more at learning science and how people really do learn and what's going to make the most memorable and engaging learning experience for them in the long run.

6:50  
Have you done education? Like, have you done pursued any like kind of graduate education or university education in being an educator?

6:59  
not formally, but let me let me back up a little bit. There was some some of that stuff in my psychology graduate programme, because we do talk about learning in the field of psychology. So there was some initial impetus on that. But for me, the vast majority of has been self directed learning in exploring about learning outside of the formal educational system. Yeah,

7:25  
it's as an adult, right adult learners, I think we don't always realise that. It usually takes experience, but we don't realise that. So often, when we are teaching, we're teaching like we're teaching kids, right? You're, you're the authority figure. And you're like, just giving information to people. It that was really that was the thing that I struggled with, was like, How do I change this? I'm not just giving information and engaging, because everyone's got different learning styles. You said different pacing, you know, how do you bring all these things to make it you know, some people are gonna want that auditory. So we're gonna want that kinesthetic, some, you're gonna want to have that discussion? And how do you put that all together into a learning environment, so that people like take that information on and they can go to the clinic the next day? And try to apply it or or think about it? And that's, that's hard. But I would say with with YouTube, a lot of it, in my own journey has been learning from people that I learned well, from, what did they do? How do they how why do I gravitate towards this person who's, you know, seems to me like that works, their learning style works for me. But also, yeah, like you said, reading the the education, science and the adult learning principles and be like, how do we, what works and what doesn't work for adults? And what works for one person is not going to work for everybody. So we can't Yeah, one singular approach?

8:44  
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, just the same way that you emphasise the importance of reading research for our field to make sure that we're doing things that are supported by adequate evidence whenever possible, the same thing really goes true in the learning field of looking at the things that we're doing. And, you know, I know some of the early episodes of your podcast here have been focused on myth busting. And this is good example. There's some of that in the learning world, too. I mean, there's some things out there that are just very pervasive ideas that I latched on to early on, and just, you know, learned by reading a lot of research that some of those things just simply aren't true. It Like A great example is learning styles. There. The idea of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles has never been supported by any of the adequate educational research, you know, there are preferences that people have for certain types of learning strategies. But the real key is, are you constructing something in your learning activity that's appropriate for what you're trying to teach? Like, you're not going to teach somebody how to swim with a PowerPoint presentation, despite the fact that I may say, I'm a real visual learner I need to see pictures or whatever. You can do that but that's a psychomotor skill and it because then it's going to need to be taught in a fashion that will be done more kinesthetically. You know I run into this all the time, because I do a lot of online teaching. And I run into students saying, Well, I'm a kinesthetic learner, I can't learn online. And so I asked them, Okay, can you explain to me how you engage in clinical reasoning and clinical decision making in a kinesthetic process? You know, what's the, what's the hands on way you do that go through the process of clinical reasoning to identify somebody's pain complaint, for example. So the key is, does that really match? What they're really trying to learn? So?

10:32  
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that point up. Do Yeah, because I did. Yeah. Well, you're right. It's not style. It's preference. And that's a more correct way of saying it too. Because, yeah, that's the thing I encountered too. Is that oh, yeah, everyone else is learning these. These are the these are the three primary learning styles. And yeah, and then you read the research on education, you realise? No, those are just preferences. But it's more about how do you like you said, how do you apply? What are the outcomes? What are the Yeah, some people use, I guess, competencies or skills, you know, for the task. One things I found, actually, for me as an educator, which I wish I had learned earlier, is because for those people that know me, my real passion actually is I coach soccer, like, I don't like that whole life. I coach kids, and I'm on the field, probably four to six, sometimes seven days a week. I love it. Giving my coaching certification, my coaching education for kids, and you can apply the same principles to adults actually taught me more about being an educator than any bet. Educating this is all about, like changing behaviour, or influencing behaviours, or, and so I take those those principles and apply them to your classroom, when you're teaching and engaging with adults, you're like, oh, my gosh, I wish I had known this a decade ago, this was so much easier. But I agree.

11:45  
Yeah. You know, one of the places that really helped me get that same, and I'm totally on board with you with that whole concept. And one of the places that helped me understand that a great deal is when, again, this had to do with once I started learning a lot more about online education. And looking at andragogy versus pedagogy pedagogy being that how do we teach children but and andragogy being how do we teach adults, but also recognising to in the learning world, there's, there's sort of a big distinction between academic learning, and job or learning workplace learning. So for example, you know, in academic learning, we're sort of given, you need to, you know, take these courses, you need to pass these tests. And, you know, these are sort of supposedly the educational markers that tell us that you've learned the things you need to do to master this content. Whereas in workplace learning, and this is like a lot of the, you know, the additional education that you have to do in your job, when a new piece of software comes around, or a new product comes around, you have to learn how to use it or whatever it is on your job. This is more situational learning about I just need a smaller chunk of information and a smaller piece of learning. And I need to know how to apply this and use it to make my job better. And so a lot of the focus in that workplace learning environment is a lot more on outcomes of can this person have a significant behaviour change exactly what you're talking about with on the soccer field? Can we make a significant improvement or behaviour change in this individual, when they go through our little educational experience, whatever that happens to be. And certainly, I think in the continuing education world, in the massage field, a lot of what we do is kind of sitting on the fence between both those models. Some of it is as an academic course kind of model, but a lot more of it is sort of, we're taking a course to try to do something to learn new skills that may change the behaviour we have in our clinic and some of the outcomes with our clients that way.

13:43  
Yeah, it's what we do as massage therapists. I mean, this is a bias I have a belief I have is that is is how we are educated primarily in school needs to be updated to be more in line with more the kind of the educational science, because so much of what we learn in school, and I'm assuming I'm speaking very generalised, very stereotyped here. So boosters, you can understand I'm not speaking with everything I'm speaking about majority, in my experience, is it's very much pattern recognition type learning, we see this thing we apply this technique or this strategy, and therefore this is the expected outcome. It doesn't really inspire that critical thinking, you know, perspective as much, would you? Do you agree with that, or can you expand on that?

14:36  
Yeah, I would certainly agree with it. And I think a lot of that is educators trying and again, kind of making a distinction between what happens at entry level education versus some of the more advanced education that might be in the continuing education realm. There certainly is a drive at entry level for this is what you need to do to be able to master the main end goal. She's passing a licencing exam, you're graduating from your programme training programme in passing a licencing exam. And the goal of passing the licencing exam may not necessarily be in line with the goal of training you to be a really good practitioner. Because to be able to pass a licencing exam, when you're just new to all this information, you need those black and white categories of like, this is always this way. And that's always that way. And that's how it's going to be on the test. And as you know, when you get out into the real world, it's pretty darn messy. And it doesn't always look like that at all. And you have to be a plug for the podcast, you're the thinking practitioner, okay, you have to be that individual who can think on your feet, and be flexible in the way that you look at something and see it from a completely different perspective. And that takes a whole different type of learning and a whole different type of, of understanding. I think,

15:59  
I agree with you there. You see there being a place though, in the kind of entry level education where you were learners could be given maybe more curiosity, or more exploratory way, so things aren't that like, you know, black and white. Yeah, so

16:19  
I think absolutely. And again, this is kind of like, you know, at least my perspective through mind is, you know, distorted lens of viewing those things, a lot of possibilities are on the horizon for how education may change. And I think, you know, a lot of that is going to be driven by the capabilities of what we can do with online education, for example, when it is done well. And just to give you an example, this kind of goes back to something that you were saying a second ago, there's this thing called the, the Rip Van Winkle complex. I don't know if you ever heard that. But the story, you know, the the old story about Rip Van Winkle a falls asleep for 20 years, and he wakes up in the world around him is all different and changed and all that kind of stuff. So the way that story goes in the education world is Rip Van Winkle falls asleep for 200 years, and 200 years ago, falls asleep, wakes up in the modern era looks around. And he is just absolutely stunned. They're these, you know, things flying through the sky, there's people talking to things in their hands and devices and seeing pictures on the screen of all this kind of stuff is his whole world is completely unfamiliar to him. And then he walks into a school building. And he goes, I know what this is. This is a school, it looks exactly like it did back in my day, you know, and that's the thing, it really hasn't changed that much. And it's really that whole idea of how do we do something different with education. So that, for example, instead of it being that walk into the classroom teacher talks to us, gives us information. And it's just one sort of one pace and one contents, tub for everybody. There's a way to personalise learning, so that you know, and in massage school, for example, this would be so relevant, because we have people coming into massage school, just out of high school, we have people who are mid career life changers who had some health care professions work in their background, those people shouldn't be in the same class doing the same things with each other, there should be a way to personalise their learning experience so that they can, you know, push themselves where they are, and do that in a different way. And the ability for online education to personalise that experience based on where you are, at a certain time is a whole lot more engaging and has a lot more potential than than the traditional model that we have with just one teacher in front of the classroom having to give something to everybody. That's the same.

18:46  
I always wanted, you know, to when I was in massage school, you kind of wanted to be given the answers, right? Because that's what you thought you needed to know. But I realised that when I what you learned in massage school was just the other teaching you that you said to pass an exam. And you go into the real world and the learning occurs when you are out with working with with clients, and you realise that everything I learned in school really just taught me not I never felt like I really taught I was taught what I needed to know, to be an effective clinician. And a lot of this game, a lot of the learning I had to was more so I had to undo and we talked you talked about earlier about the myth busting stuff and kind of like use this as a segue into that conversation. Do you find that there is a lot of value in in mythbusting like it's something that we see so much of and it creates so much debate and so much argument and so much finger pointing. For me as a learner as an educator, I find that like I find it very difficult for people to take on new information that might be less wrong, and less we get rid of the old stuff. Yeah, the old stuff in its place. I don't know what's your thoughts on that?

19:58  
It's always a trick Get one with folks. Because I think you know, you want to have some degree of solidity and some degree of foundation underneath you, before the rug gets jerked out from under you, which it often does. And some of these kinds of things. And we have this sense of wanting to know that where we started and what was what was the thing going on, for us, at the beginning, had some degree of accuracy and validity to it. But where I see the big challenge, and problem for us is that massage therapy currently, is something that evolves out of a lineage model of education, as opposed to more of an academic model in a lot of the other health health care professions. So what I'm speaking about here with the lineage model is that, you know, a lot of the training was established, because so and so started a massage school, and they taught some students and then the students came and taught in that school, and they learned from that teacher and like, a lot of it goes back to the a, an individual, you know, a guru or a figurehead of some kind as the one who really has the, the wealth of wisdom around all these sorts of things. And so that's, you know, particularly difficult I think, to, to have that kind of challenging, the challenging the information, or challenging the norms, or whatever, when you have that kind of lineage model, because it gets personal for people, like, how dare you question my teacher kind of thing, or this is the kind of thing that I learned so. But I think in terms of, for growth, and for advancement, and for the future of our profession, we have to be able to do that, we have to learn how to do that. And we have to be able to extract the academic debate from the personal attack. And that's where we have a hard time right now, it seems like especially on social media,

21:51  
and we see it all the time, the and this is what, I don't know, both, I'll speak for myself, but I used, you know, with kind of Facebook and social media that kind of started to explode in the 2000 10s ish, maybe around, then there was so much you go on any of the massage therapy, Facebook groups, and there was people fighting and people arguing and, you know, just throwing research and and they always were these personal attacks, it was, or people, someone would try to make an academic argument, and then someone who would take it as a personal attack. And that is really, I after watching and observing and guilty of engaging in those, sometimes you realise that you're not moving the needle anywhere, you're pushing people further away from that healthy debate. So now I don't even engage in stuff, like I'll see people post stuff, which is, I know, is just belief, it's faith based, like you said, I love that the lineage model of education never heard that before. But I, I love that, you know, that you got that head that grew, or that figurehead at the top, where you have a leader, and, you know, everyone falls underneath that. I think that's, that's, that's, that's so true. But when the academics when the science doesn't support what that person says, you know, people will often go like, based on their, their emotions, rather than logic and and that is such a, it's so unhealthy because it really does prevent us from moving forward.

23:18  
Yeah, well, you know, and again, because we are so influenced by the, the climate and the environment in which we live, we are clearly living in a far more polarised kind of social climate now than we used to, and it's just not okay to be wrong, you know, it's just like, and that's become a real problem is that some people feel like it's, it makes you less than and, or it makes you, you know, somehow rather less qualified, if you say you're wrong about something, or if somebody says, you know, this is inaccurate, and, and people get just, you know, highly, highly protective about that sort of thing. And I just, that's, that's so difficult, that's really so difficult to do. And I tell people at the beginning of all my classes, you know, that's, it's so this is a ground rule for this class, you have to question authority, you know, that means, if I say something that goes counter to something that you believe, you got to call me on it, number one, because I might be wrong about something and I want to, I might have said something wrong and want to correct that. But this is how we engage in the academic learning process and grow ourselves as clinical reasoning practitioners as being able to think through different points of view about stuff. So it's a hard mould to get out of, especially in an in an educational environment like that, but very needed, I think, for sure,

24:43  
and to have that humility, to as a and to be humble as an educator, say, you know, I don't have all the answers. If I if you don't like what I'm having to say or you want to challenge you, please challenge me because, you know, I'm I'm not I'm not the figurehead. Head knows everything. I have stuff that I'm comfortable with my knowledge. But, you know, maybe you have a different perspective? Or maybe you have something to challenge it. Just say that. Yeah, I would say the majority of SI instructors that I have encountered in my life don't have that they're like, Nope, don't question me. This is the information. And I find that is, that's not conducive to open learning or the critical thinking.

25:22  
No. And, you know, that's one of the reasons that I say that to people in the class is because I think that's been their experience in a lot of other places is that, you know, they encounter people who have, I don't know, if that's just, you know, the sense of insecurity on the part of the instructors or just feeling like they have to defend a certain, you know, modalities perspective or something like that. But yeah, I think that's been a lot of people's perspective. And I've certainly encountered that as a student in classes over the years as well of, of teachers not being so receptive to alternative viewpoints and, and things that might challenge the model that's being presented sometimes.

25:59  
One thing I often almost always will say to people is that, you know, all opinions are welcome. Like, there's no like, let's have lots of questions, lots of discussion, as it but strong claims require strong evidence. So if you have something you feel very strongly about. You have to you have to be able to defend it with with evidence, otherwise, it's just an opinion, which is totally fine. We all have them. But and what I have found in that in those cases is that people don't have even they have strong opinions, there's not often a lot of evidence to support that it's, well, I took this course or in my clinical experience, it's this. And it always comes to conversation of like, well, I'm never ever going to question your clinical experience. I'm never going to question your outcomes you're getting with people to come to see you. Because that's not what we're talking about. We're talking what ideas, ideas need to be defended. And more often than not, particularly people are coming from a modality empire, an acronym based kind of way of thinking. It's, it's, it's that the figurehead that that lineage model. That becomes when people realise I found that when people realise that, okay, I actually don't have any evidence to support this other than my clinical experience. Maybe I can take on a different understanding for why it's working than the one I've been given. And that's why I found that the real learning can occur to kind of reconceptualize, you know, maybe you're not releasing this thing, or you're not doing what you've been taught, but you're still getting an outcome. But the difference is, the explanation is different. Yeah. And this is why it's important to be less wrong.

27:28  
Yeah. And you know, the whole modality Empire thing that you mentioned, there's an interesting, I think, sort of double edged sword and dichotomy about that, which is, those those sort of modality empire, perspectives and ideas are really valuable. For a certain thing, which is, they're valuable to hook you, as an interest in this gives you a framework to start looking at something. And a way to organise your understanding of something of maybe that is a way to work in a completely different kind of method than you've used before, to have a way to look at things in in this whole organisational perspective, so that you can organise the content, the information, the and the large amount of annual ideas or perspectives that are coming across as something, but when this is there, but for the end of it, there comes a point when you need to love, you need to know how to let go of that as well, you need to know how to recognise it, there's going to be times when this particular model may or may not necessarily fit the same any longer. Or it might, there may be things that come up and research that will challenge some of the fundamental principles of it, and you have to be okay, with letting go at that time. And that's often the place I think where a lot of people get stuck is they can definitely jump into it and get hooked by it. And it does its job of really getting your interest piqued and getting you excited about wanting to do something different, but then you get hooked in the framework of it and unable to extricate yourself from that.

29:01  
That's, that's a great point there. Whitney, I'm glad you you expanded on that. When I was early in my career, I was totally into the whole fashion craze. And I was into like Structural Integration and stuff and, and then, you know, everything I saw I was a functional problem. Yeah, and so every single thing I saw was, you know, there's some type of structural imbalance or something that needed to be corrected. And what I found was, it moved the focus away from the person and more towards that, that fixing mindset of like, if you come in for these series of treatments, I'm going to do this thing and you're going to feel better. And then when people didn't feel better I was left without any answers. I was like yeah, maybe you just need more treatments. And it really resulted in this like you're you're stuck you because you only thinking one way and then I started attributing all my successes as me releasing or fixing or creating this balance and and now you know you take a jump into the pain sign stuff and all those swings you almost have the complete other direction, because you're like you're there these At the time, I felt there are these two polar things within, you know, over time we learn and we start to realise, okay, like, I don't believe I'm releasing fashion because I've never seen evidence that says you can do that, that I know that when I do these techniques on people in this way, sometimes people feel better. Yeah. And maybe they feel better because of more of these interactions that we're having, which can be explained by the pain science stuff. So yeah, there's a there's an integration of it that I think is, is really important. But I like what you said is that when we think just in this one particular model, we were too close minded, because we think only one way we have our blinders on.

30:38  
Yeah, it's just it's that that saying that if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. And if that's the way you look at things, and then that will be the lens through which you practice a lot of times, so Oh, for sure, for sure. That's very true.

30:53  
So you've been a sea instructor for a long time? When did you start teaching?

30:59  
I started teaching entry level education in 1989. And I did the same thing that you did, which is like, shudder when I think of the people who wish had to be exposed to me in class, because I was only a year out of massage school. And this is the way it works very often. And I had been working as a teaching assistant at our school and a curriculum director said, I'm going to I'm going to give you a class. Now I want you to teach this particular class and I said, I'm not ready. And she said, Oh, yes, you are, you're on the schedule. This is when you need to start doing it. And so I really had to kind of ramp up my efforts to try to be much better teacher in there also had another thing working against me that I laugh a bit about, but I think it helped me along a lot, which is that I have always looked very young for my age. And I was at that time, we think probably about 27 or so something like that. And I'm serious, I looked like I was about 17 or 18 years old, I really looked like a young kid. And then in massage school, this is back in the late 1980s, there was a pretty good percentage of the people that were coming in as mid career changers who had been doing something else in their life. And they came into massage school. And so I was having to teach a lot of these people significantly older than me and like a walk in and everybody's like, Who's this kid, you know, and what's he doing here. And I recognised the only way I was ever going to get any kind of respect from any of the students was I better really know my shit very well. And so I really put a whole lot of effort into making sure I really knew what I was doing, inside and out. And so, so I taught entry level education for a few years. And then I got hooked up with Benny Vaughn, who was a sports massage icon really in our country here in a bit around the world as well and got a fortunate opportunity to work with him. A good a good that early on in the early 90s. And then started teaching some continuing education courses with him and then eventually went out on my own around 9090 or five, something like that started teaching some of my own stuff at that time.

33:10  
And so obviously, back then you were there obviously wouldn't have been basically online or self directed stuff, but you were teaching just live courses,

33:20  
all live courses. Yep, it was all workshop stuff. I had produced some very, very rudimentary training materials about orthopaedic assessment for massage therapists, because it was something I thought was grossly missing in a lot of continuing education courses. Everybody was teaching all kinds of treatment strategies and treatment methods and do this kind of technique and that kind of technique. And nobody was doing anything about like, how do you even figure out what the nature of somebody's problem is so that you know what you're supposed to be doing? So I have produced some, some very embarrassingly rudimentary orthopaedic assess assessment manuals at that time. And that's kind of what I started teaching in a lot of those workshops was was a lot of assessment stuff first. And then that kind of morphed into different things over the years as well.

34:06  
Right? If you have some textbooks and stuff out there, don't you? Yeah, so

34:09  
Well, eventually, that that manual ventually moved into a much more reasonable book that I self published in the early or mid mid mid 1990s called orthopaedic assessment in massage therapy. And then I did another book that was mainly about treatment called orthopaedic massage theory and technique. And that was done for Elsevier, the big medical book publisher. And also this was Whoa, late, late 90s, early 2000s When that one first came out.

34:39  
Nice now are you still are you do you still teach like live in person courses or is all your stuff you doing online now? No,

34:45  
I'm still doing some live courses. I was kind of off the road like all of us were off the road during the pandemic for a while and I was trying to cut back on a lot of the in person courses because I had been doing, you know, a couple of weekends a month for, you know, fifth 20 years or something have been a long time I've been doing that sort of thing. So I was really kind of burned out. So definitely took some time off. But I have been back on the road doing some more teaching. Now again, despite the fact I was just teaching last weekend and a couple of weekends before, and I got something else come up the next couple of weekends. So a few things back on the road again, and I love being in the classroom, or that aspect of sharing things with people in a live environment, you know, getting questions to come up and seeing the light bulbs go off with people and all that kind of thing. So there's some of those things that that just can't be replaced in an in person class that are really valuable for getting great learning experiences happening. But I also have recognised, there's a lot of things that I cannot do in the classroom anywhere near as well as I can do in an online environment. So each thing has its benefits for sure.

35:51  
What kind of things would you say are better for online, that you can get an in person,

35:56  
what I think are really better is a lot of the deeper sort of clinical reasoning principles and processes. So for example, you know, I can't teach good clinical reasoning in a two day weekend workshop, you know, what we can do is we can give a lot of content and really that environment should be spent more doing things like psychomotor skill training, where you can give feedback on movement things and techniques and things like that. But when it comes to the process of figuring things out through clinical reasoning, and sort of the assessment process and things like that, which involves making mistakes, changing and correcting those mistakes, and then going down a different path, like I think this might be what's happening here, and then oh, wait a minute, but that's not consistent here. Maybe that's not what it is, I should go back and do something else and go down another path. You know, we, I certainly have found that building some more complex branching scenario. activities, learning activities in the online environment is a great way to do that kind of thing where people get to personally explore the process of making certain decisions and seeing the outcomes of those decisions. Either this was positive or this was negative, Oh, I gotta back up and do something different. That's how you train clinical reasoning. And you just can't do that in a classroom with a large group of people because it's a person's off. It's a very highly individualised process. And secondly, you can't make that you can't make those decisions happen for everybody. There's no way you can do that kind of thing in the time that it takes to do it in the classroom.

37:33  
One thing I wouldn't joke stupid joke always make I make anyone that listens to takes my courses. I make stupid jokes all weekend, just because I just could be trying to be too boring. And just my sense of humour is stupid. But one of the jokes I always make is that the always say, like, the most on evidence based way to teach adults is to give you a bunch of information in two days. Yeah. Because it's, it's ridiculous. I don't know about your experience. But my experience like really, like by time you've, you've hit like lunchtime. You come back after lunch, Everyone's tired. You know, you've started early, though not a lot of real good learning occurs. And so you maybe you get like two half days of like, people can be engaged as the morning. But then by the time the afternoon comes, people want to go, they're tired. They've been sitting there all day, even if you haven't doing stuff, it's still there in a classroom. I always find it's such a hard way to educate people. And that's why I like the online stuff. It's like the self directed online stuff is that it's a good way to give people information. Yeah. But then the if you can do it like that, I think the best way would be a hybrid where people come where they did they take your online stuff, like, here's all this information. And here's some things for you to to work to work through and think about. And then the classroom is where you can really apply, like I said, the psycho psychomotor skills or those problem solving things with based on people in front of you.

38:57  
Yeah. And, you know, what you're saying has been certainly been my experience too. Exactly, which is that, I mean, there is the learning science principle around this, which we call cognitive load. And that is, you know, that's what happens in a classroom, you just can only take in so much amount of information, and process that effectively. And you just can't do that very well for eight hours a day, you know, days in a row like that on on the sort of weekend workshop format. So that's one of the logistical challenges. And the beauty of online education is doing what we call chunking. You know, in very small chunks of information or content or things like that, that people can intersperse with their life, like I just had a client cancel, hey, let me hop online and do a quick little module here while I do this, that actually enhances your learning, believe it or not even better because it's separated apart from other things that you're doing. And this is sort of the the process of interspersing that learning with other activities actually makes it anchor more effectively. So that's a good one. The things that I love about that particular environment, but then, you know, coming together as a group in the classroom lets you be able to talk with other people exchange ideas, you know, certainly feel things that you're trying to do and teaching a manual skill or something like that. So yeah, like, like I said, there's things that that work best in both environments.

40:19  
Yeah, I tried to keep my video, my online ones, like maybe 15, between five and 15 minutes long for like the chunking aspect or like, watch a video and then do something else. Yeah. And that video is on something very specific. Yeah. And yeah, and that's because what I've found, is that teaching, like a weekend course, or you can give people all kinds of information, because it's a cognitive load, I think there's only so much they can handle. And people will take your course. And they're like, Oh, you get good feedback, hopefully, and, and they're like, this is going to change my practice. And you hear all these wonderful things. You're like, Yes, I nailed it. I did such a good job. You know, given these helpless people during this weekend, and then you they they'll send you a question a couple weeks later, or you'll see them post something online. That is like, I'm like, you just took my course. That was a that was a key thing I want you to learn. And it didn't land and then I never blame them. I'm like, I'm a shitty instructor. I was like, I must have not emphasise that enough. Yeah. And where's the online stuff? You're like, hopefully, you know, because they don't just power through, you know, 10 hours, 20 hours of content? Yeah. Build those chunks? No, like, no resume, no time to think about it. Yeah. Well, you know,

41:26  
and another great example, that is, I've seen this happen and took me a while to kind of get an understanding what was really happening here. And it wasn't until again, I started studying learning science that I realised this and you've I'm sure had this kind of thing happen, where, let's say you're, you're teaching something in a class in a physical classroom, when you're teaching, you know, maybe a complex topic about something and you're going through this content. And you think you're being really clear with the explanation, everything like that going through piece by piece. And then you you get you say something, you know, really pertinent and relevant, and then you start to move on to something else. Student raises their hand, say, hey, Ken, what about so and so? And which is what you just got through saying a moment ago, and everybody looks around at that person is just like, what's wrong with you? Weren't you listening, he just said that. And they don't realise that student is not that that student was not paying attention. They were so busy writing down what you said right before that. They were writing down and mentally processing what they were writing. And so they did not hear you. And a lot of times, we don't think about the fact that you can't have both those channels working where you can write and see and pay attention to what you're writing and also listen appropriately at the same time and take stuff in. So everybody who's sitting there copiously writing notes in a classroom, I can promise you, they're missing a lot of stuff that you're saying, even though they look like they're engaged, and they are engaged with what you're doing what you're talking about. But that's again, one of the things that makes the capability in an online class to stop a presentation, write something down, rewind, pause, go back here again, wait a minute, what was that? I did not get that. Let me go back and do that. Yeah, I wish we could do that in the classroom. But we can't. But you know, this is the one thing I would say to teachers out there is that, remember that a lot of people who are looking like they're really engaged and they are, they're busy writing things down. They're missing half of what you say? Because, you know, yeah,

43:23  
yeah. And it's true. When every time I see people writing in a class, I almost always will pause and just kind of wait, if I can, if I know is it because I they're there, you know that they're not listening. Yeah, well, they're they are, but they're not you, they might miss something, because they're trying to catch up with what you said before.

43:41  
Yeah.

43:43  
That's one of the things that I one of the things I learned from just some of the adult education stuff I had been learning about was, you know, the some of the danger of like, giving people like notes packages before you teach, because then oftentimes, people will just read through it, and not listen to what you're saying. So that way, they're reading and not hearing and those those, those competing messages, just get ya lost.

44:10  
Right. And there's, there is absolute artistry to the way that a lot of those things are often presented in the classroom to I mean, I, you know, I was like everybody else when when PowerPoint came out, it's just like, oh, this is great. Now you put all this content on the screen, you can start talking about this and, and years later, you know, I Oh, and the guy's name is going to skip me now. But he wrote this book, called presentations in here read that book. No, but it it's an absolute wonderful book. It's about how to create an engaging visual presentation and one of the main themes out of that book is get all your text off the screen as much as you can when you're doing presentations. Because when you put that text up on the screen, People are going to be reading it. And just like the person who's writing the note, they're not going to be listening as much to what you say the purpose of your visual aid is to enhance what you're talking about, and what you're showing them what you're doing, what you want them to listen to the words through the auditory channel, and what you're doing. And when somebody reads something, it also engages the auditory channel, because there's they're reading and saying those things in their head. So that auditory channel is also somewhat blocked from being able to do that. And I did a little, I was at a presentation for the teacher at one of the teachers conferences here. A number of years ago, when I was talking about cognitive load and putting text on the screen, I put this, you know, in the middle of my presentation, put this PowerPoint slide up on the screen that had a whole bunch of text on it. And, you know, wait until I knew people were about halfway through reading the text. And I just said, Stop. I said, somebody tells me what I just said, you know, and there's like, everyone was looking around like, I didn't hear it, I didn't hear what you just say they just say, like, see, that's exactly what happened when you put a 10 Yo slides up on the screen with with tonnes of text on it people are reading because they think that's what's important. And they're not listening to what you say.

46:17  
i That always drives me crazy at conferences, you know where you there's, you go on watching these really smart people and but it's just so much text and they're talking and you want to read it and you even if you try not to read it your eye, at least for me, my eyes get attracted to the taxa and you miss stuff. And I

46:35  
and I will say this, and this is like probably blatantly inappropriate statement to say, but scientists are the worst presenters that I have encountered. They just, you know, great at getting data and putting that stuff together. But they as a general group, they tend to be really bad at presenting that stuff in terms of getting it up there, putting visuals across to them, because they just information dump onto the PowerPoint slides and just give content. Yeah, those kind of environments.

47:04  
It's not, that's not a good way to learn. And it's a good way to put your audience to sleep to unless they're really engaging, but usually they're not there. Because you've been too sad. Like I met you we met briefly or I met you at the San Diego pain Summit. Probably

47:17  
yeah. A couple years ago. 17 I think it was 17. Yeah, yeah.

47:22  
And I mean, I, I enjoy it there. And I enjoy the people and I enjoy the content. But one thing I learned very quickly, after probably my, after my first year, which I think was 2015 Was I can't sit through a full day and that conference, or any conference I attend to because it's just like cognitive load is just so much information. I just, I just, it's overwhelming. It is, yeah, conference format is more of a social thing, I think, than a learning thing. Because it's hard to learn all that stuff. And

47:53  
it is absolutely it's just there's no way to kind of really process that. And a lot of this again, is, you know, there's a certain aspects of it is important in information delivery. But until that gets anchored and used in a way that you can really apply those things, they just are not likely to stick very long.

48:13  
So I know, we know just I know, Justin, Kobe Solis, who you're friends with his Well, he was telling me some great things about your your online kind of self directed courses. Just tell us a little bit I'm curious to hear about, like, how you structure them and how you go about them. Cuz I know they're quite heavy. Like they're, like a big learning thing.

48:33  
Tell me a little more. Yeah, they are. So again, this kind of like goes back to historically of sort of learning a lot more about how to construct online education, and how to instruct online courses that started for me back in the early 2000s was when I first started working on this stuff. And the software for online education was pretty rudimentary at that point, too, in terms of what things look like. But, you know, I say this to people, a lot of times this is kind of indicative of the issue. And both the problem, which is it's really easy to create online courses. And it's really hard to create good online courses. And we've technically made it very easy, for example, just to put videos up, or put PDF documents up on the line or something like that, and call it a course, which is what a lot of people do. And quite honestly, there's just a lot of really substandard online education. I think in our not only in our profession, but across the board in many different professions just because it's so easy to do that. But what I really wanted to do is to do something that was going to be a lot more engaging. And so that required the learning a lot more about what are called the authoring tools. So what an authoring tool is that these are these are the software tools that we use to build certain types of online experiences. So instead of just having content delivery through something like a video over a PDF file or something like that, an authoring tool might allow you to build a us, you know, let's say like a, an online scenario where, let's say you got a clinical problem that you want to get people to have an experience with, you build this little thing, and you might put characters on the screen or something like that. But you narrow you usually give them a, a question or some kind of thing that they're going to have to solve and they have choices of am I going to take choice A, choice B, or choice C, and then they click on one of those choices, and choice A will take them down one path, choice B will take them down another path, and choice C will take them down on third path. And usually, one path is correct. And the other two are incorrect, but they might get quite a ways down those incorrect paths before they realised that this is not really, on my radar, I made a mistake here, this is not something that's going to work out. Like I chose to treat this kind of thing. And really, this is something that's a contraindication, I shouldn't be doing this. So you're training them on the exact kinds of things that happen in the clinical environment. But these kinds of learning experiences can be pretty darn complex to build, because just a few minutes, a few minutes long scenario could take quite a number of screens and images and things like that to create and produce. So they're very, very time consuming to, to create on the front end. But they really are very robust learning experiences later on. So I really like to try to focus on you know, very, kind of a mixture of different learning experiences that have people, you know, answering questions, retrieving knowledge, putting things together, that they learned in previous portions, but interacting with what they're doing on the computer, and just, instead of sit just sort of passively sitting there and watching or reading things.

51:39  
Well, that's a way different experience than I've had doing online courses, you know, being able to have those those those authoring tools to to kind of go through scenarios. I think that's, that's it's more realistic. Yeah. Which are what you're not going to get in a lot of, and most of the other online learning software, or course based software, it's most of the stuff that you do online. And with my own the stuff that I do as well, a lot of times it's just it's it's PDFs, its videos as questions, it's like downloads workbooks, but being able to actually choose a scenario and then follow that, through a reasoning process is not something that I have seen in any of the online course builders that I've played with.

52:21  
Yeah, and that's, again, this has a lot to do with the software applications themselves as that these authoring tools aren't cheap. And the the course learning platforms, such as you know, just the Thinkific, teachable, the various different course authoring platforms out there have built some types of learning tools into their platform that make it easy for you to upload video to upload PDFs, and word documents, create multiple choice tests, and those kinds of things that are pretty standard sort of processes. So a lot of people don't even realise that there's more to what can be built than just that kind of stuff of just putting content out there. And so, when you're working with these authoring tools, there's a much much steeper learning curve and learning how to use them and how to use them effectively for a good kind of learning experience. And as I said, because it takes so much longer to build these kinds of learning things. Oftentimes, a lot of people just don't want to get into that. Right. Except for you. Yeah, right. Except for us. Crazy people who are geeking out on things like, oh, man, this is cool. We could do all kinds of things with this. But yeah, you get the bear buried in the weeds. For sure, what,

53:34  
what software do you use like you like, what do you have it embedded in your, in your website, a learning management system?

53:39  
Yes. So the learning management system is essentially the shell that holds the learning activities. And so we are getting ready to move to a different learning management system. But the learning management system holds the learning activities that are built in the authoring tool. So there's two main authoring tools that I use, mostly right now they're both from a company called articulate. And one is called Ries. And it's kind of as a web based applications or web based interface, that that is designed to make it really easy to make very mobile friendly, learning activities that will work good on all different kinds of devices and things like that. So it's a really kind of a quick and easy web builder process for coursework, but it doesn't really handle things like those complex branching scenarios very well. Those are built in another tool called storyline. So and again, articulate is the company that produces them. storyline is kind of like the, the Cadillac and granddaddy of all of the authoring tools. There's there's two or three big authoring tools. If you look in the this one of the online learning community, I think the probably somewhere around 75% of the people who are building significant online web content, especially in the corporate environment are using them with authoring tools, or most of us. 75% of them are probably using storyline. Oh cool. I'm curious Yeah. Look into there are I think you can get a free trial for like a month or something like that to play where I play around with it and do it because it's, it's expensive, it's, you know, close to $1,000 a year. So it's not a one time purchase, it's really it's a subscription thing. But that's because they have all kinds of robust libraries of resources that you get access to. And it gives you a whole bunch of other things that are helpful, once you learn about how you might use that authoring environment more effectively for

55:32  
it. Now, something I think a lot of people don't realise, too, when you when you do you have online content out there, it's really frickin expensive to operate those things, you know, with this, they're all subscription based. And, you know, depending on what you sometimes there's content maximum, how much you can upload how much you can happens, you know, and then you want to if you want to build landing pages and sales pages, and blah, blah, blah, is that it can be 1000s and 1000s of dollars a year?

55:58  
Oh, it is very well aware that we keep looking like what can we get rid of, you know, to try to cut these costs down. But you know, the systems are so enmeshed from the CRM to the graphic software to the E commerce platforms to purchase the courses to the, you know, the authoring tools to build it to the LMS hosting and the website hosting yet all these kinds of things. It's catching, catching, catching after a while, for sure.

56:23  
Yeah. I mean, I don't know what most people pay. But I would say yeah, like, I would say, if you can do all that for less than $5,000, you're probably doing okay.

56:32  
Yeah. $1,000 a year or a month, a year, a year

56:37  
would be I mean, some and you could do 5000 hours a month, depending on your on your volume. I would say that it's it adds it's a lot of money. And yeah, people don't

56:47  
like if you can do that sell for $5,000 a year, you're doing really good. That's what I would say, oh, yeah,

56:52  
well, I think I was just saying that get the cheapest, right? If you want to be the base model of everything, without all the extra extra trim and paying and stuff. Yeah, it's very.

57:02  
And also, like, what you're saying is absolutely true. Which is like for example, if you're just starting out doing something, you don't need a lot of these things that are based on certain volumes of like you can get, you can make a CRM work out of Google Sheets and Gmail and a couple other things like that. Or you can make some other kinds of things. Until you get to a certain size, you know, or like your free MailChimp account and you know, all these things, you can tie a bunch of tools together that don't cost a lot. But when you get to a certain volume of things, stuff starts breaking when you have all these things cobbled together and you realise like, I need a system that's really designed to do this correctly, you know,

57:41  
right, rather than a bunch of things that yeah, you just like, copy and paste and put it together and try and make it try make it work? Yeah, one thing that, you know, being doing having online stuff in Canada, which puts me at a disadvantage are people like myself, and I'm not the only one is that everything we have to pay as an American funds. So sudden got that 32 number with it, it's 35% Extra, you know, a MailChimp account, which is $100 us a month or whatever is actually you know, it's 135, Canadian and Thinkific, which is like $1,500 a year American, you know, these guys have exactly the CRM and stuff that just adds up. So yeah, but it's valuable, though. I mean, it sounds like your courses are great. And I've heard great things about them. Are you still seeing a demand for them kind of post COVID? Are you are you feeling that people are kind of online learning? fatigued right now?

58:36  
Well, if I were to look at what's happened in our business, in terms of just looking at the numbers, I would have to say there's been a very significant online learning fatigue, at least from the acceptance of what we've seen in in a lot of our courses. And we've tried to look at well, how do we need to rebuild them and do things to make them more interesting and engaging for folks? And like, what what do people really want, you know, what are people looking for? And, but I do think there definitely is some degree of online learning fatigue that's affecting a lot of stuff in the online education space. But again, that's for me always a driving factor by trying to make more interesting and more engaging learning experiences for people

59:15  
who want to business lessons I learned was, you know, that when things are good, you don't innovate? You just kind of like, hey, things are great. And then when things are like, Oh, what's happening? That's when like your creativity or innovation comes out.

59:30  
And it's good idea Yeah,

59:31  
that evolution needs to occur and I would say my experience the same too. I mean, you know, putting out Con Ed stuff online was it was a great like everyone wanted because everyone was least here like people were kind of just learning online for the first time in our industry. There wasn't there wasn't a lot of stuff out there. But then yeah, you see people I think there's there's that there's that fatigue, like yeah, I've been in front of my computer for three years. Go and enjoy nature again. I'm allowed to go to do out Go in public and do things. And so I am seeing a little bit more of an uptick in interest in in, in person stuff which the last three years people didn't really, it was hard to get people together in a group.

1:00:12  
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

1:00:15  
Yeah. So what do you do you feel, though, that you think that they will people will come back? I mean, because you have this this successful online business for a while? Do you feel that it's just a, this is just the way things are right now, you feel that long term, there's still that,

1:00:30  
what I think is that I've lost confidence in my ability to predict the future. Because, you know, for so many years, I've watched a lot of trends happening. And I've felt pretty confident, kind of like, you know, you're whitewater rafting, and you kind of like looking down the river, and you're seeing where the rocks are, where the rapids are, and you know, it felt pretty confident being able to chart a course and chart a path. And now I feel like, I'm just going around a bend, and there's a giant waterfall. It's just like, I really have no idea where it's gonna go. And it's just very uncertain. So I'll just have to wait and see what happens with it all. It just seems like a really, this is not just with online courses, I just think there's a lot of things going on. Right now. We just don't know how it's going to pan out and how it's going to change? Will it go back to the way it was? Or will things just be permanently changed? I don't know.

1:01:27  
Yeah, I It's, I feel the same. I'm not really sure either what, you know, what people are looking for? You know, some sometimes I see, you know, you always look out there and you see what other people are doing and what's working, what's not working. And I know that a lot of sea instructors right now aren't getting the same numbers they were before and you know, and something that we've, I want to ask you about was, you know, the the CT industry, you know, and then the continuing competencies and continued education or professional development, whatever terminology you want to use it every every massage therapist anywhere has to have some type of continuing education that they have to require a quality assurance thing. But do you see massage therapists as doing the bare minimum just to get their requirements to get I need this many hours? Or this many credits? Or do you see that a lot of massage therapists like just wanting to go over, like just do stuff because they want to learn?

1:02:27  
Yeah, I think it's, for me, I've recognised that I can't speak of massage therapists as a group like that. Because there's really both of those things in there, where we have a lot of people that come to our courses that I know, really want to learn stuff. And then you know, from a business perspective, a lot of times we'll try to schedule a course, in a state near their timeframe where their CPE requirements are due. Because we know, to get enough people in there to fill the course, I've got to have some of those other folks in there who are just trying to meet the requirements. And that's all they really want to do. And I can often tell in the classroom who those people are too, because they're not often as engaged or as enthusiastic about the learning process. So but you know, certainly, in our online courses, we don't get very many of those people who are just there for just to meet their CPE credits, because the courses are just too thorough and comprehensive. And there's so many other ways to get easy, quick online courses if you just want to get your numbers met. So but I would like to, you know, my goal is to also start trying to produce some other very short course elements for some of those people who might just be feeling like they want to get those requirements met, but they've heard something about what we're doing, they kind of interested in it, but they just want to stick their toe in the water, they're not sure they want to do it yet. And some of those people might, you know, get a taste of something and decide, like, you know, I kind of think I'm getting kind of into this, I think I might want to look into further and do something a little bit more in depth. So I think it really absolutely ruins the game, because I also have a lot of people that will come through both physical courses and some of the online stuff who have, you know, twice or three times as many credits as they need for their licensure requirements. But they're doing this because they really want to learn stuff.

1:04:17  
Yeah, as an educator, those are always the ones that you're like, you love those people cuz they just want to learn they have a million questions, a million things to share. They're so engaged. And yeah, I mean, that was kind of a loaded question. Because they asked you initially because you do get both right. You get you get people that are just like, you know, and as an educator, you never really you can, I mean, everyone has their own experience. I mean, time, money, you know, maybe you live in a remote area and you just like you can't take courses and you need your credits because you still want to work. I totally get that. And so you do get you do get a lot of it. But I would preferably, you know, the scooter, I guess goes to the question of our massage therapist. Do we want to be a healthcare professional or do we want to be a service Roger. And I would always like to think that, you know, if we want to view ourselves as healthcare profession, you know, minimum credit requirements, you know, you know, it should your goal should be like, How can I best learn to serve the people that come to see me? In which case you should you should take stuff that interests you, and whether it's credits or not. And that's a, I don't know if that's a, something you can speak to at all?

1:05:25  
Well, you know, I've tried to have grappled with that dilemma for a couple of decades, doing different types of things, you know, working with the National Certification Board here in the United States on credentialing issues and things like that with their national certification programme and trying to look at is there some type of advanced credentialing that we might engage in that would maybe make distinctions between these two different tracks, they track of sort of personal wellness massage, and that track of massage as a health care profession. And, you know, again, just like the previous thing that we were talking about, I don't think there's any way to talk about massage therapists as a general rule with that concept, because there are clearly those that just want to be working in a personal wellness environment. And there are those that definitely just want to be working in a healthcare environment. And what I find interesting about this, from an education perspective is I think we've been doing a pretty good job of educating massage therapists to work in the personal care wellness environment. In the last couple of decades, I think our schooling does a pretty good job of preparing people to do the things that they need to do for that. And I, again, I cannot speak to education in Canada. And I know that's kind of varying, depending on which province you're in and everything, but certainly here in the US, we are doing a very poor job of training massage therapists to be healthcare professionals, because the the entry level training problems just don't go there, they don't go far enough to do that. And so what that does, is, that means for an individual to get that type of training and skill set and knowledge base that they need to work in that kind of environment has to do that through continuing education courses. And there isn't a set curriculum for that. So you're basically choosing your own courses of what you need to do for learning those kinds of skills to work as a health professional, which is kind of good in that you get to pursue the things that you're interested in, but also very troubling, in that you're probably not going to take some things that you really need to take and really need to learn about to be a good healthcare professional that just aren't in your interest area at that point. So that's a challenging place for us right now. And I just, you know, having worked on this issue for, you know, at least 25 years, I don't know that I'm going to see it resolve or change before I'm out of here. You know, I just, it's troubling, but I just don't see the momentum to get that kind of thing. addressed. There's too much entrenchment in each of those different camps to do what might need to be done there.

1:08:05  
Yeah, it's, it's a stakeholder issue. There's so many different stakeholders involved and so on. And, you know, you have a culture of a profession to and what people what people want, and the schools and the licencing boards, you know, there's a lot of Pete a lot of moving pieces that need to kind of come together to decide how are we going to, how are we going to do this? What's the best path forward? Yeah, I do. I like we said, though, I mean, that the schools do a good job of teaching like kind of the wellness profession and, and that's the thing that's, that is great about massage and independently asked, but I feel like you know, you don't have to go out and be a massage therapist, you don't have to go in this kind of medical route, you could go and you could, you can, you can go work in a spa, or you can just go work in general wellness, relaxation, super valuable, all of them are valuable. The medical route, though, is one where I would like to see our professional, at least in Canada, I can speak for us here would be for us to be a little more integrated in kind of the health care system, because right now we're kind of despite paramedical thing, right, where we help people with pain, and then in movement and rehab stuff, but it's, you know, it's not part of like you're not working in hospitals, you're not working in care homes, you're not working in outpatient facilities. You kind of everyone works in private practice. And I would say that, you know, in order for us here to be more integrated in kind of the full health care system, you would need more that that education that more of that training specific to those populations that you're going to see.

1:09:39  
Yeah. And we, you know, one of the places where we run into a big sticking point with that, I think, and it's probably true in both of our countries is that, you know, there's a lot of people within our profession that you say like, we need to have a degree programme for massage to be able to work in that direction. And yet, there are some schools out there that offer degree programmes, but the question really becomes, are you actually learning more about massage as a healthcare practice in those degree programmes? Or are you just having to take other courses that meet an entry level baccalaureate degree, like, you know, English composition, and, you know, whatever it is psychology one, a one to one, those things that will help you meet course requirements to meet the number of hours needed for a baccalaureate degree. And if we are going to move into college or university level training programmes for massage therapy, I'd want to be pretty sure that people are going to get their money back because the cost of college is so astronomically ridiculous now that it's putting it out of range for a lot of folks. And the idea that we would move massage therapy training programmes into that environment would have to be offset by something like there's gonna be a reasonable return on that investment for those people. And they better stick around in the profession for a while to make that work.

1:11:01  
Yeah, in Canada, yeah, there's no degree programmes here in Canada, there's a handful of massage schools that are run through like a public university or college, but they sign a degree granting like you go through and it's like, you get your diploma, but you don't give you like, that sort of backhoe degree, you know, get your bachelors of science and massage or whatever. And, you know, I think the cost difference in the States versus Canada for your education is significantly different. It's actually more expensive in Canada to go do your three years or two years in massage therapy education, I used to do a four year degree programme, because the the massage colleges here are all privately run, right? Interested in very expensive, like, I don't know, if it costs, I'm gonna say about $30,000, it would cost Wow. Whereas you could go and do a four year degree. And depending on what part of the country you live in, or whatever, your tuition. I mean, I'm in school a long time ago, it wasn't that expensive. I did my undergraduate degree. But now you're probably you could probably do it for like, $20,000. Wow. So it would be it would be less. Yeah. And that would? And I don't know, there's books and stuff on top of that. But either way, it's there. They're both expensive. Yeah, I would say the massage therapy education is actually more expensive. Yeah. But the problem that you see when it's just with our education in either country, when it's, you know, a diploma, you know, competency based programme is that you got to become a massage therapist. So you decide you don't want to be a massage therapist anymore. So you break your arm or you have some health, illness. And you don't have you don't have anything to fall back on. Yeah, like it's like you're it's like a trade, right. So you're trained as a massage therapist, if you don't do massage therapy, your education isn't

1:12:39  
extensive, not easily transferable, for sure. Transferable

1:12:42  
anything else? And so that's where I would advocate for us as profession, I would like us to I'm an I would say, I would like us to be in the university, I would like it to be a bachelor's degree, because I think it would provide more ability to to kind of manoeuvre or move between different professions. So say you like, yeah, I was massage service for 10 years. And maybe now I want to be a nurse. So you just go and you could do like two years of nursing? Because there would be some overlap with that education. Right? Yeah. But I do agree, though, you make a good point that if you're going to get a undergrad degree in massage therapy, and you're just filling in the gaps with like, all the different, you know, courses that you need to take, I would say that's probably not going to give you any better of an education. Right? It would be great to have more applicable stuff that maybe you would often learn in a continuing education course. Yeah. Have that be part of your base education and universe.

1:13:44  
And so our big dilemma that we run into now is where do we get the qualified teachers to teach those more advanced level skills and abilities in those training programmes? Because right now, that's just I mean, the the schools are just scrambling to get teachers just to teach the very basic entry level training programmes, and it takes a lot different skill set for your teachers to teach more of the, you know, things in the healthcare model of massage. And so finding faculty to do that is a big challenge.

1:14:14  
Particularly Yeah, so particularly when they don't, we don't have a lot of highly there's not a lot of highly educated massage therapists out there. In terms of like, Masters PhDs. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm guessing in Canada, we might have like five PhDs. That's it. Yeah. Not a lot. And I don't think any of them are working in the massage world. Or maybe one is, right. So I know you guys have more in the US, but also way more

1:14:39  
love more people, but more proportionately I doubt it's significantly more, you know.

1:14:47  
So that's, that's a good point. It's a problem because how do you build a university educated? Population of massage therapists, if you don't have university, educate people to teach them Yeah, have them like they can learn stuff from other like, you know, physiotherapists or nurses or, you know, kinesiologists, or exercise physiologist that might have the education to teach there. But, you know, they're not teaching, they don't do what we do.

1:15:14  
Yeah. See, I see a very, very long learning curve ahead for that process. to happen. Yeah.

1:15:21  
Yeah. Which I guess makes sense with what you said in 25 years? You know, you're probably not gonna see it in five years, either, but

1:15:27  
No, probably not.

1:15:30  
But these conversations are good to have, I think, if we don't have these conversations, then you know, nothing's going to happen. No,

1:15:36  
it will, we'll get somewhere, you know, we'll move in a certain direction and see where we get recognising where some of the challenges and things are ahead of us. And, and, you know, those of us who still believe in trying to do good things are still going to work towards improving things. So even though I may not, you know, believe that we'll get to that kind of ending point with it, I'm still going to work towards, you know, making things better for us in the field, somehow, rather, whatever that turns to look like. Yeah,

1:16:03  
that's great when and I'm really appreciate you doing the work that you do. And I've never taken one of your courses, but I've only heard good things and I know of your work. And I know that you're you're you're trying to do all the right things to elevate the profession and to give people information that's going to help them be better therapists. So I really appreciate taking the time to be here. We I feel like we could just talk forever. But you know, I know that there's a cognitive load of people that probably only listen to Eric, when he talks so much. It's been an hour and a half. Maybe I'm gonna turn this off. So just before we leave, what's your what's your website? Where do you Where can people find out what you're teaching? Or how can they get in touch with you?

1:16:43  
Yeah, people can always get in touch with me through our company, the Academy of Clinical Massage, and that is at Academy of clinical massage.com and can email me directly Whitney at Academy of Clinical Massage.

1:16:56  
Amazing, check out Winnie. Check out his stuff. He's got great things out there. And if you want to learn lots of fantastic things, it sounds like you you have a very different way and a very, I would say probably more evidence based way of doing your your, your online education. So I appreciate that. So thanks again, Whitney.

1:17:15  
Thank you so much. Great talk with your

1:17:18  
thank you for listening. Please subscribe so you can be notified of future episodes. previous verses is available on all major podcast directories. If you enjoyed this episode, please share on all your social media platforms. If you'd like to connect with me I can be reached at my website, ericpurves.com or send me a DM through either Facebook or Instagram at Eric Purves RMT

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