When I was younger, my father was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, and I used to take care of him. He had only 10 percent motion and couldn't walk. This was in the 50s, and he suffered ill health and much pain for many years. He went to the best doctors in New York, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and no-one could do anything for him. My mother had some problems with her health as well, so everyone always used to look to me as a child and say, "Make sure you stay healthy." I have appreciated the value of my good health from my early experiences.

In the mid 1970s, I developed a very bad back. Sit-ups were recommended, so I would do 70 sit-ups every morning; they didn't help me at all. Someone suggested I see a massage therapist. There weren't any in Powell River, where I lived at that time, so I traveled to Vancouver. I found the treatment worked wonderfully. It helped my back, and it was the first time I had felt that I had ever really relaxed, so I was quite thrilled.

This is what initially motivated me to become a massage therapist. I looked at different massage schools, and ended up completing my massage training in Boulder, Colorado. When I came back to Powell River, people told me, "You'll never make it here; the town is too small." But I did, and I have.

I love the work, the contact with people and healing. A lady who couldn't walk well came to see me and after a few treatments found that for the first time in ten years, she could walk more than a hundred yards. I learned enough at school to finally heal my own back, and through that experience, I learned a lot about bad backs in general. There seem to be a lot of people with back problems, so I regularly see patients with bad lower-back conditions.

In my estimation, massage therapists are very underutilized as being part of BC's health care team. It isn't always the answer to give people a painkiller or muscle relaxant. Sometimes a condition will heal itself, but we could be used much more effectively by the health care system, as we are trained in remedial exercise. If there is no lack of money to study cancer and heart disease, there is no reason why we couldn't study musculoskeletal influences. Millions of dollars a year go down the drain because of work time lust due to back pain. It is not a minor problem.

One of the problems with health care in general, I believe, is our fascination with high tech things and gadgetry. Almost every night in the news there is something about a child who has had a liver transplant or some other high-tech intervention, and medication is always hyped. The fact that doctors fail at treating countless conditions isn't mentioned. Chiropractic, acupuncture and massage will once in a while be featured in a story, but only rarely compared to high-tech medicine.

I personally know people with back pain who receive medication, get hospital bed rest therapy, or have CAT scans, and before you know it, have cost the health care system thousands of dollars, when a few massage and chiropractic treatments, and perhaps a few exercises, are all they may have needed. These treatments would have cost one or two hundred dollars rather than thousands.

The average person isn't aware of the benefits of massage therapy. It's something like a stay-at-home parenting. Parents do a great job bringing up children, the most important job in the world, but there is no large scale recognition that it is an important job. It is the same with massage. Massage therapists are put through an extremely rigorous program before they become registered. Massage isn't just a good back rub; it's a highly technical procedure, using hard-to-learn, subtle healing techniques.

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