We Are All Complicit In The Failure to Update the Foundational Education Guidelines.

I’m exhausted from raging against the machine for the greater good. The days of masking, fearful/quiet acquiescence, and toxic compliance are over. This is the year of civil disobedience, social justice, and accountability.

In my opinion, BC RMTs may not be qualified to provide safe, ethical, evidence-based, medically necessary care for injured and vulnerable patient populations.

This is the disappointing saga and logical consequence of a regulated primary healthcare profession in BC that failed to appropriately and adequately update the foundational education of their registrants (Guidelines For Foundational Knowledge-GFK, and the Interjurisdictional Competency Document-IJCD) for almost 30 years. Thereby harbouring major gaps in learning along with a plethora of outdated content and pseudoscientific explanatory models of “massage techniques” that have been quantifiably refuted by current medical literature and research…for decades.

In failing to update these critically important legislative documents, we put the public and registrants at risk for neglectful care, increased risk of exploitation and predation of vulnerable populations, and open ourselves up to insurance fraud.

After all, it is really easy to just rub nice-smelling lotions and oils on people and not think about their injury, their story, their goals, assessment, home exercise planning or self-care strategies, and collect 126+ dollars from insurance companies for it. Easy. The public doesn’t know better and expects it, the practitioners are indoctrinated to believe it, and healthcare insurance companies are paying for it.

The GFK was written by a group of RMTs, and the IJCD was written by a group of 5 lawyers. Both groups were unqualified; I understand why they did it, but that’s a tale for another day. It was a necessary evil, and we have known it needed to be appropriately reviewed and updated for the entirety of my career (2006-2023) and have not done so. We know that there is content in our GFK that has not been updated since at least 1994, and there were major gaps in learning along with a plethora of outdated content snake oil mumbo-jumbo at that time.

Additionally, there’s no character and fitness assessment for applicants to the profession, and a dearth, a toxic denial even, of necessary education, training, and resources for BC RMTs on working with various ambiguous situations and vulnerable and divergent populations such as survivors of sexual abuse, domestic violence, trauma, and pelvic health conditions and injuries.

From the 30s to the early 90s, the professions of massage therapy and physiotherapy were together under one regulatory college, the College of Physiotherapists & Massage Therapists of BC, and we shared the same foundational education up to 1994. At that time, the profession of massage therapy was separated from physiotherapy to be a separate health profession. I’m uncertain of the details of the separation, other than the resources of the college weren’t divided equally, and this is where our story begins. Rebuilding a newly minted healthcare profession.

Since 1994 the physiotherapy profession has become a master’s degree program and their guidelines for foundational knowledge are updated by special committees at the Universities comprised of qualified professionals and experts in the subject matter. Although their GFK is far from perfect and has challenges of its own, it is a far cry better than what the RMTs have done.

Comparatively, the massage therapy profession has failed to accomplish a meaningful critical review and audit of our foundation education by qualified professionals and experts since separating from physiotherapists, nearly 30 years ago. We lag behind, hamstrung by corporate greed and pseudoscientific rhetoric.

I appreciate the magnitude of the task to review and update these critically important documents (IJCD and GFK). These matters take time, money, effort, and expertise in health sciences and education.

The outcome of such an update will mean big and costly changes for private institutions, and an overhaul of the curriculum which is based on the IJCD and GFK.

Possibly and plausibly, it may mean that RMT education could conceivably be delivered, at least partially, in a public university or college. Naturally, the corporations that are “educational stakeholders” have a material interest in keeping things as they are. This doesn’t mean that all those involved in education share that perspective. Rather, it is a transparent acknowledgement of financial & logistical hardships the educational corporations may face as a result of the update to the foundational guidelines for education. And, this would mean that those with a material interest in these educational corporations have a conflict of interest in any discussion and influence of decisions regarding these matters.

The responsibility of a self-regulated profession means the burden of responsibility is on us. To bear witness to these critical issues and do nothing is to be complicit.