Touch Therapy is a broad term describing therapies ranging from Structural Integration to Acupressure. This webpage is an introduction to this subject and is intended to offer guidance to the question “Is Touch Therapy appropriate for me, and if so, what kind?”.
Manual Therapy is a common label for many Touch Therapy modalities. My foundational training is in Structural Integration, sometimes called Rolfing or Hellerwork. I obtained my certification as a Hellerwork practitioner in 1983. I have had extensive additional training in many Osteopathic and other Touch Therapy modalities, which leads me to feel that I can speak somewhat knowledgeably on this subject. I describe myself as a Manual Therapist.
In Europe, especially Great Britain and France, Manual Therapy is widely considered a first-line tool for treating issues that in the US are addressed using pain meds, steroids, Physical Therapy, and surgery. If Manual Therapy does not produce results, more costly and invasive treatment options are considered. However, Manual Therapy usually resolves an issue related to bio-mechanical organization, making this strategy the most cost-effective option from a universal healthcare perspective.1 Additionally, because Manual Therapy is oriented toward identifying the source of biomechanical stress and inflammation, the correct manipulation can alleviate a broad range of seemingly unrelated symptoms, assisting the body in regeneration and healing. Almost all high-value Manual Therapy publications are now sourced from Great Britain or France (see reference section).
Countries with socialized medicine, which are focused on minimizing the true/absolute cost of treatment (resolving an issue vs moving a patient on through the system) tend to adopt Manual Therapy treatments, as for many of the issues MDs are presented with these tools are unsurpassed. However, Manual Therapy is both time-consuming and requires therapeutic touch, two issues limiting its utility in the US. Osteopathic Doctors (OD’s) have at least some Manual Therapy training, but rarely get a chance to practice in the 15-minute appointment that an exclusively for-profit healthcare model has locked us into.
Integrating Manual Therapy into a medical practice liberates MDs from the role of gatekeeper for non-visceral aches and pains, as patients can be directly referred, and then only address those issues not quickly resolved by these techniques. The productivity increase MDs would see from having this option speaks to the possibility of integrating Manual Therapy into the for-profit healthcare model we employ in the US, a process that is slowly taking shape here.
- Most of the time it will resolve a structural issue (more than ~80% of the time in this writer’s client cohort). If not, it will be realized quickly (within 2-3 sessions) and, at a minimum, treatment prepares the soft tissues for the more aggressive intervention alternatives, improving patient outcomes. ↩︎