Prompt payment discounts are a highly contentious subject in the USA among massage therapists.

The thing is, besides the ethics of 'ai' in the big picture and the absolute certainty of the inclusion of false information, no one bothered to actually write this article, so why should anyone bother to read it?

As ever, love with your heart - use your head for everything else.

It's great to make a living (or even a profit) from massage education, but that MUST be secondary to actually delivering that promised education to its fullest.

No, I can't prove that the author got an ai assist, but what I can say is that I have a huge body of experience which has led me to very accurate intuition based on experience that is turned into heuristic automatic action, to borrow a turn of phrase.

(At a glance, the pdf looks interesting!)

I haven't read the whole pdf yet, but the article that links to it was written with ai assistance, and that's a damn shame. Just as we need to become research literate, it's also incredibly important that we become human literate, so we can spot the "writing" that no one bothered to write.

Your Canadian system is much better than ours, but from all I've been told, it's still operating under a lot of 'assumptions' about the reality of pain and the efficacy of massage.

In the USA, and while we have competencies suggested nationally and required by state, that's not really what I'm asking about at all. Paul has a specific viewpoint on massage, based on his knowledge and experience, and I'd like to know more about his ideal translation of that as education.

Don't tell me there's already an article on that and I've just missed it!

Have you ever thought of building, at least in the abstract, what a massage curriculum could or should look like? There are, quite frankly, an awful lot of "guide-rails" (by which I mean mostly institutional inertia with a bit of embrace of quackery), even when there is desire to update to reality.

Don't make such kind offers!

I'd need to pay you for the volume of work I can come up with along those lines. Not that your articles are lacking, just that I'm always seeking specific inroads as they pertain to particular lessons.

So would we call that a true increase in circulation, or would we call that more of a blood flow redirection of an extremely limited scope? (Yes)

I promise, this isn't exclusively a Pain Science reposting account.

That tiny study mostly shows localized skin blood flow increases with touch.

Same with this tiny study, except this one specifically calls out if massage increases skin blood flow without boosting arterial flow, it might divert blood from recovering muscle, not help it.

Well, what about it?

Not much. As some of you chimed in, before citing claims, ask: does this effect actually lead to clinical change? Was it tested on healthy people, and if so, does it apply to the real-world conditions we treat?