Pandora's Box? Licensing Massage

Pandora's Box? Licensing Massage In 1998, 21 states and the District of Columbia had massage laws in effect, with 7 more pending. That number has now grown to 42 plus DC, which might be part of the reason I haven't seen a discussion among body workers about the pros and cons of licensing in some time. Lately, I've been missing that debate. In Maryland, where I was living when I started professional

training, statewide massage regulations had already passed and would go into effect several months after I and my classmates graduated. Because licensing in two of the three places students attending that school were likely to practice was already a done deal, our training steered us toward getting licensed. For the few months between graduation and the law going into effect, I had to deal with a different license for every county, which was, to put it bluntly, a pain in the posterior. When the state law did go into effect, I was pleased to have one place to write a check to instead of four, and the consolidation of paperwork as a mobile massage therapist made my life somewhat easier. Given the choice of several sets of regulations to be mindful of or one overarching code, I was more than happy to have the state license body workers. After all, I'd never known any other form of practice. Others spoke about the days before regulation. To me and other brand-new massage providers, hiiitiier that was like our parents or grandparents talking about the days before television…it was outside of our experience. To some degree, we thought we could understand. It sounded either like the good old days they said it was or it sounded like being without creature comforts we were accustomed to, depending on our position. Either way, we'd known from the start of our training that if we wanted to practice openly, we would have to submit the paperwork, write out the check, and be ready for audit just in case one day we became the one out of 300 or so selected for review by the licensing board. The most frequently cited reason that I've seen for enacting laws requiring massage providers to be licensed is "public protection." The brief form of the story goes something like this: people who haven't been properly trained could injure their clients, so a license is needed to protect the public from these unskilled intuitive touch providers. (Uh-huh. Right.) States make money off of licensing programs. I personally don't believe for a moment that the cost of administering licenses isn't met by the fees collected, especially in places where all licenses expire at the same time, regardless of the application date.