If you are a member of the American Massage Therapy Association, you may be aware that every year the AMTA publishes an industry fact sheet with statistics about the massage therapy profession. Typically it addresses the demographics of who receives massage, how much they pay, what the average massage therapist looks like, and other details that create a snapshot of our profession. A typical fact sheet has the following headings:

• Massage Therapy as a Profession
• Who is Today’s Massage Therapist?
• Massage Therapy as a Career
• Education is Valued in the Massage Therapy Profession
• State Regulation of the Massage Therapy Profession
• Who Gets a Massage and Why
• Massage and Healthcare
• Massage Therapy Research

This year’s Fact Sheet is available here: http://www.amtamassage.org/news/MTIndustryFactSheet2010.html, and it is free to everyone: members and non-members alike.

But you may not be aware that the AMTA also produces a much more thorough report specifically for member schools. Titled 2010 Massage Profession Research Report, this year’s effort is a monumental piece of work with 59 fact-filled pages of information about our vocation, along with ideas about how that data can be applied. It provides a wealth of information based on extensive surveys of practicing therapists and massage therapy clients. Interested readers can access the report here: http://www.amtamassage.org/a/shoppingmall/ProductDetail.aspx?SiteMapId=5&ProductId=2874.

It is free to AMTA members, and available for a charge to the rest of the public. Even if you aren’t with an AMTA member school, if you have any interest in the marketing of massage therapy, this report will be worth your time and money.

Here is a tidbit from p. 9, taken from a survey of clients who had received massage within the past year:

Primary reasons for receiving last massage:

Pampering/ just to feel good/ special indulgence              17%

Relaxation/ stress reduction                                                       32%

Medical reasons (including injury, spasm, pain relief)      32%

The remaining 18% had no specific reasons to get a massage; their responses were “it was free”, “It was a gift,” and the like. But the trend is obvious: of all the people who got a massage recently, about one-third did it to deal with a pressing physical or medical need—more, if we add the people seeking stress reduction.  Compared to the 17% who claim “pampering” to be their primary reason for their last massage, we can derive some important information about the need for therapists to be well-educated in how to work with clients who live with imperfect health.

In an apparent contradiction, on p. 13 the answer to the question, “Where did you get your last massage?” was most often—and by quite a wide margin—in a spa setting. This points to the fact that the difference between massage as a service industry and massage as a health care intervention is a distinction that many clients don’t understand. Massage therapists in spas, cruise ships, franchises and salons are daily dealing with clients who are looking for a health care consultant more than a pampering provider.

As our profession considers what lies before us in the possibilities of tiered licensing and varying regulations to reflect levels of training, I hope we can keep in mind that separating practitioners by skill level  on paper is one thing: it is entirely another when the public is looking for health care, and goes to the spa to find it.