Hey guys?
Medical massages aren’t sexy. I just. I just want to put that out there. There are two kinds of massages, okay? The gentle kind that feels nice but doesn’t actually help or fix anything, and the kind that you actually can use when your muscles are in knots.
The latter hurts.
Like a lot.
As in tender and sore and pressure on the areas that have been worked on hurts, and the day after is really not all that fun either.
So uh. Yeah. I’m all for writing massage into fics and stuff. Cool times. But if, instead of it being proposed as a relaxation technique or something, the protagonist’s back is like a rock (actual phrase said by actual doctor to describe my back), or in knots (this too), or anything to that effect when the massage is proposed (let’s just say I speak from experience and leave it at that), just please remember that s/he will be spending most of said massage wincing in pain, not moaning with pleasure.
Because ow.
That is going to depend on what modality of massage they’re using, actually; deep pressure isn’t necessary to get a therapeutic effect. Sports/deep tissue is not the only method of therapeutic massage that works on rock-like or knotted muscles, but it’s *not* the only way to have therapeutic effect on extremely tense muscles.
A lot of people aren’t familiar with the other forms of therapeutic massage, but they do exist, and they can be extremely effective.
I have personal experience on both sides of the table, for what it’s worth.
(Mostly my problem with massage in fic is that most people who aren’t trained, which most characters aren’t going to be, are usually actually awful at relaxation and therapeutic massage both; they tend to go much, much too fast, and it can actually be counter-productive. Also the fact that the people writing it often don’t know the anatomy they’re describing very well, and that makes me flinch.)
Actually, as a note to anyone, if you ever want to write a massage in a story, I will gladly beta-read that for you!
A lot of people aren’t familiar with the other forms of therapeutic massage, but they do exist, and they can be extremely effective.
That’s a fair point. I’ve had an ultrasound (I think, not completely positive; it’s been a while) based treatment that was, actually, quite relaxing and not painful(!!). But also was the sort of thing never, ever alluded to in anything I’ve ever read and, most likely, not known by most people writing.
Mostly I was talking about, like you said, the writers not really knowing much about the subject. I haven’t read all that much that talks about specific anatomy over very general running-hands-over-the-back type stuff but that’s certainly not going to do much therapeutic good, in any case.
Yeah, most people really don’t… know anything about massage, which is why I generally just hit the back button immediately when it shows up! (Well, that and the fact that if it’s supposed to be sexy at all, I often can’t read it; it squicks me out as a trained professional, even if it’s completely reasonable between people in a relationship. That’s something that haunts and haunts and hauntsthe profession, especially at spas rather than medical clinics.)
And, yeah, hands running over the back gently (ie, the basic Swedish that gets used as relaxation massage at every spa/clinic ever) can actually havetherapeutic effects but not of unlocking very tense muscles (just, there’s other good effects, like moving blood and lymph). And of course even Swedish is just a bit more complicated thanjustrunning your hands over the back. Like I said, most folks who aren’t trained go much too quickly to get the best effect.
But, yeah, most of the problems with massage in fic come from people writing from ignorance about massage as therapy… I mean, running your hands over someone with oil can be pretty sexy, I’m sure, but that’s not going to fix problems in their shoulders or whatever else. *wry*
Sadly, this just makes me miss being a test monkey for a friend in massage school. “Hey, we’re doing X today, are you free for a few hours?”
(Deep tissue doesn’t always hurt-hurt, and I’d say 3/4 of the time in my sessions, which I now have monthly for 90 minutes because otherwise, my shoulder doesn’t work, I feel very, very relaxed. It is, however, not sexy.)
(Basic partner-with-oil for mild stress, on the other hand, most certainly can be.)
My general mode of operation is that I pay in full for the massages that don’t hurt and I enjoy—these include sports massages and some deep tissue work. I’ve walked out of some of these feeling like my bones have been deeply stroked, and everything around them is very warm water, but they only hurt the sort of hurt that’s very pleasant indeed. The physical therapist massage was the sort that I would never get kissy kissy right afterwards, and in general resented the deductible until a few days later, which is when the better than newness started to kick in. But I have friends and family that fall into both the PT and masseuse buckets, and if they wanted to relax a person’s muscles right out of their knickers, they all could.
