Free Massage!

[massageblog]

Do you ever feel like you have a sign on your forehead that says “Free Massage?†Every day on my social networks, I see massage therapists talking about being asked to do free massage. “Come and do free chair massage at our event and it will get your name out there….†never mind that you’ve been practicing for 15 years and your name is already out there. I recently saw on FB post where a chiropractor wanted someone to come to his office and do a week’s worth of free massage so he could get the client feedback and decide whether or not he would hire the person…I guess he thought she just wouldn’t need any rent money or groceries that week. If he’s located near a massage school that’s turning out graduates or an area that’s saturated with massage therapists, he could feasibly keep the “audition week†going for a long time–and quite probably billing insurance for the massage that he’s not even paying the therapist to perform.
At the massage school I attended, back in the day, we were required to perform 25 hours of community service…free massage on a deserving population. 15 years later, I still don’t mind performing free massage on a deserving population. I occasionally volunteer time to what I think is a worthy cause. I once gave weekly massage to someone for almost a year because he had spent nearly a year in the hospital, his medical bills were in the millions of dollars, and he just plain needed the work and couldn’t pay. One of my staff members has given a lot of massage at an abused women’s shelter. Another did deeply discounted work on someone who was seriously injured and didn’t have any insurance, and many of us have done that kind of thing at one time or another, for nothing other than the warm fuzzy feeling of having helped someone.
If there is an event going on that I think we need to have a presence at, I will pay staff members to do chair massage; I don’t expect people to work for free. We just can’t and/or won’t go everywhere we are asked to go. If the event is more than ten miles away from my office, I’m not really inclined to go there. There are plenty of massage therapists in our county, and if there’s a health fair that’s all the way at the other end of the county and plenty of practicing therapists between here and there, I’d rather let one of them have it. READ MORE…
Tags: massage therapists