Learning Outside Your Scope
In praise of curiosity and serendipity...
A few days ago, I was in a staff meeting, of sorts. The focus was on visceral massage which I found odd considering it was a barefoot massage-related meeting and we do precious little abdominal work because of the danger of very deep work in the abdomen. But also, being trained in Chi Nei Tsang, I was curious enough. And boy am I ever glad I did tune in and pay attention.
The presenter proceeded to drop a stunning amount of information in a very short time period. What I learned from her has altered the way I’m thinking about back pain, made me reconsider some of the protocols I’ve developed in my practice, caused me to question the overall quality of most massage therapy education*, and made me consider a new model of developing informational courses.
I recently made a social media post about feeling like there’s not enough time to dive down all the rabbit holes of interest. If I’d get off social media, I’d have more time to engage in rabbit holes, but where’s the fun in that? Getting to the point, I’m chronically curious. I spend a lot of time here talking about massage and bodywork, but the breadth of things I study and want to know about is unmanageable most of the time.
Sometimes, the different things that I learn complete a circle and bring a new way of understanding something I thought I had a grip on or finally explains something that never made sense. I call it information synthesis in my head sometimes, but perhaps it’s just serendipity. I don’t know the correct term for this phenomenon.
Scenario 1: Back Pain
Many, many years ago, way before massage school was on my personal radar, an ex-significant other was prescribed an OTC pill marketed specifically for backaches. Upon investigating this product, we discovered it was little more than a laxative. I have for many years wondered how this product could be effective and effectively marketed as such. But it worked, so I just squirreled that little piece of information away in my ‘mysteries to be solved later’ file.
Cut to last week’s staff meeting where I learned more about intestinal flexures and attachments and how the sacks that contain the viscera are attached and “suspended” inside the abdomen. When she started talking about how and where the sack attaches to the spine and how it moves during pregnancy my ‘mysteries to be solved later’ file exploded and puked up the backache remedy mystery. Thirty-plus years later and here is the answer to why those pills worked. Emptying the intestines, aka taking a massive shit, alleviates pull on the spinal attachments by the intestinal container. Which, in some people with certain types of back pain, can resolve the pain.
And now that I know this small piece of seemingly unrelated information I’ll be adding, at a minimum, questions about gut motility and constipation to the conversation with clients complaining of back pain. Not that I haven’t ever asked about these things, but it needs to be part of the standard set of questions.
Scenario 2: Kidney Stones
Several years ago, I was hosting a couple in our AirBnB and he came down every morning to make a cup of coffee and chamomile tea. I found this combination curious, so I asked about it. She, a coffee drinker, couldn’t live without it. He didn’t do much caffeine and explained that he suffered from a propensity to grow kidney stones. In fact, his whole family suffered with them to the point they were familiar with all the ways and lore to avoid them. I remember him saying that he’d been told by an ‘old timer’ that the best way to avoid getting a stone is to drink a cup of chamomile tea every day. He added he hadn’t had any stones since he started drinking chamomile prophylactically. This remedy was working for him after years of suffering.
Down the rabbit hole I dove trying to figure out why chamomile might work in this instance. It’s historically been used for relaxation, pain relief with anti-inflammatory and muscle-relaxant properties, menstrual cramps, sleep, anti-bacterial properties, soothing the skin, mouth and gum washes, and it’s so mild you can give it to your kids with little to no worries. Alas, nothing, and I mean nothing, having to do with it being antilithic or having the ability to dissolve stones.*** Cue the ‘mysteries to be solved later’ file.
A few years** after this conversation I was at a state AMTA conference where we were hosting Doug Nelson for a Precision Neuromuscular Therapy continuing education and his Mystery of Pain talk named after the book he wrote. I had the good fortune of getting to spend one-on-one time with him over breakfast one morning where he told a story about a urologist and a geologist arguing over whether you could call a kidney stone a stone. The story proceeded with the urologist sending the geologist a box of kidney stones to test. Tests revealed that the stones were actually encapsulated bacteria. Did I ever learn if kidney stones could be called stones? No, no I did not.
Because I sat there, blinking, as the ‘mysteries to be solved later’ file shuffled wildly and finally spat out the chamomile for kidney stones mystery. We had a lively discussion about chamomile as a preventative for kidney stones, if it might work, and how wildly disparate disciplines can yield unexpected answers to nagging questions.
Welcome to My Brain
Anyway, am I the only one whose brain works this way? When I talk about these things in front of people, I get the look. You know, the one where people silently call for help to extricate themselves from my weirdness and vicinity. Which results in me not talking to people very often. I’m bad at small talk. Surprise!
I’m also trying to figure out where all the mastermind groups are for someone like me. I need to find a table to sit at where I am far behind the others. Or maybe it’s a table where we’re all in different disciplines. I don’t know, but I feel like I need a regular brain infusion of unfamiliar and weird material. Suggestions are welcome.
Food for Thought
When was the last time you thought about how you think? And how was it for you?
Do you enjoy the process of synthesizing information or do you prefer just to implement what is presented to you?
How do you feed your mind?
* There’s another whole article I could write on how woefully underprepared we are when leaving massage school. But if you’re here, you’re probably already aware of that. And that’s not a slight on massage schools, it’s an acknowledgement of the lack of national standardization in our education. When each state gets to decide how many hours of education are required, there comes a point when there’s not enough time to teach everything that we need to know. Therefore, Continuing Education becomes critical to fill in the gaps. And now I’m thinking about advanced educational degrees. Do those exist in massage therapy? Or do we have to change disciplines to get there?
** Wibbly wobbly timey wimey, a few years ago could be five or forty…
*** This was before AI search engine integrations. Now you can find some information on it, but I’m not sure how much I trust AI to answer the hard questions.
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About the Author: Sharon L Bryant has been a massage therapist since 2008 and a massage therapy educator since 2014. You can read more about the TISHLIMS project, its history, and what brought Sharon to Substack.
I feel like when I focus on learning something, I get that "information synthesis" you explained... I love to learn a new layer in understanding a related topic - but because I read WAY too deeply into things, it actually seems like I relate deeper realizations to seemingly unrelated topics in those serendipitous moments. That's pretty fun and cool, but how useful is it for me to figure out that "Fact A" relates to "Patient 9" simply because they both have the Earth in common? I get a little too meta sometimes. This is why I love Taylor Swifts easter eggs possibly. Anyways, these fun rabbit hole realizations happen so quickly for me, I just have to be open to learning and staying curious. The second I get skeptical or let myself sniff on a whiff of BS sensed in the information and stay in that mindset too long is when I'll fight like hell not to let the potential fake news seep into what I already know.
Thank you for this. We do need more massage therapist friends to have tea with and discuss sarcomeres and pathologies. Please let us know if you are showing up to another AMTA convention.