When many people think “massage in Thailand“ their mind wanders in a certain direction that I will attempt to correct.
The well-known center for what we call Thai massage is at Wat Po in Bangkok. Their whole focus is maintaining, preserving and developing traditional massage methods. When you meet some professional Thai masseuse, and also some non-Thai, you will often hear them mention studying at Wat Po.
While there are different techniques for massage I will boil it down into the two basic groups, relaxing massage and medical massage. When you come to Thailand as a tourist you will definitely see here and there shops and places on the beach where people have a table and advertise massage for 150 to 300 baht an hour (31 Baht=US$1]. That is relaxing massage. Very often you can ask them to concentrate on a certain part of the body that concerns you while some places focus only on foot massage. I often recommend people just get a general full body massage and then find places causing tension or pain and concentrate on those areas on the next visit.
The second kind is medical massage. These people do things Western medicine practitioners often pass off to these people. Most Western medicine focuses on knives and pills. Of course that’s a gross exaggeration since everyone knows many hospitals have rehabilitation centers that work on different things so in some sense I almost feel like I want to contradict myself but not really. Those hospitals focus on the two things I mentioned and then derivatives that came from either a simulation from other countries and customs and traditions or some evolution from knives and pills.
What traditional medical massage in Thailand does is focus on medical problems. Most people have heard of the ancient Chinese practice of acupuncture and many explanations associated with meridians and esoteric connections in the body and life and nature. But we all know the answer to everything is 42. If you don’t know that you haven’t read “the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“.
I have had some extensive experience with medical massage and acupuncture to fix things but I don’t really want to go too much into acupuncture right now. I will try to sideswipe it by suggesting some commonalities between the two. And for a more extensive explanation the two cannot be separated. The basic, simple concepts are that nerves and tendons and muscles and bones interact. That’s basically it. If you hear more esoteric explanations then that’s fine. But if you just take this simple concept you will find it is more than sufficient to explain why the results of medical Thai massage is so effective.
Very often the pain or discomfort comes from nerve, muscle or tendon issues. Those actually can be fairly easily treated with medical massage. Small and big problems can occur when tendons work their way out of place. When you move they are stretched too far and cause pulling on the nerves and cause pain. The same thing can be said for muscles. And the same thing can be said for nerves. If a nerve happens to wind up in the wrong part of the body or the wrong part of the muscle, somewhere it can pinch or be stretched too far, it will cause pain.
What medical massage does is try to find what is out of whack with one of these three things and try to get it back in a place where it’s not causing strain and pain. So the key is to find someone who can identify the problem and then fix it. That sounds pretty simple but it’s difficult to find those people. I have two experiences with people who focus on the medical aspects of massage. The first one comes from a nerve in my back, probably the sciatic nerve, being kicked out of place from sleeping on a moving boat overnight without a mattress. I know that’s the problem because I met someone else who was also a scuba diving instructor, did the same thing and had the same problem. The nerve then connects with other nerves that go down the leg, some thing winds up getting out of place and the nerve gets pulled or sometimes gets pinched so feeling disappears or is reduced. It can also cause tendon and muscle pain that can be so excruciating you would never be able to sleep. The problem caused my leg to feel like it disappeared sometimes and I would just fall down because there’s no more feeling in my leg; no control. Then it morphed into severe pain so I couldn’t sleep. And for about five or six years, maybe seven, I was not really able to run. It caused some disruption in my back muscles that didn’t allow my legs to work quickly
A friend in Phuket (Thailand) introduced me to a well-known local massage family, three generations. I went there before the rush of people, found a lot of old hotel gowns around a fairly unclean massage area. People explain that hospitals have patients there who could not be treated with Western medicine. The third generation fellow came out and without asking me where the problem was he just started in and it was the most painful one hour I have ever had in my life. He went deep into the muscles and into the tendons massaging the nerves the muscles and tendons themselves. If this happened in the United States my US masseuse friend explained it would’ve wound up as a lawsuit. Torture is also illegal (unless…. OK this is not a political diatribe). throughout the massage I was not crying but I was definitely wincing and making noises indicating how painful it was. There were several people around me waiting for their turn and they were giggling every time my voice created a sign of pain. Part of this is due to cultural reactions but I find also Thai people do not complain as much about pain or scream as much about it as people in the states. When my half hour was finished my whole body was in total pain. The fee was “up to youl”. It was what you wanted to pay or what you could afford. I made it back to my place went to sleep and woke up early the next morning. But the next day there was absolutely no pain anywhere in my body and the general discomfort in my back and leg was very much gone. I went back three days later for another treatment, just as painful, and that cured the problem. But while I say “Cure“ I meant took care of the constant leg pain problem. I still have the nerve problem in my back so if I stand in one place too long my back pain starts in. And when I’m standing up on a moving train or bus the pain starts in and just keeps getting worse so I have to sit down. But I take care of that myself when I can by going in a pool or in the ocean and using my legs to kick like hell and exercise those back muscles to keep the nerve pretty much where it should be. Anyway that is what I think I am doing and what I think is happening as a result of the exercise even though I can’t see inside and I have not had somebody tell me that’s exactly what’s going on but it works so I do it.
The second experience I have with medical massage in Thailand is what I’m going through now. I spent about six months when I was in Japan reaching for something while watching TV with my hand going sideways to a table that was lower than the chair. I think what happened is the tendon got stretched out of place and when I move my arm in a certain direction the tendon was pulled too tight and pain kept me from extensive use of my arm. The girl who is working on that now graduated, of course, from Wat Po and while it hasn’t been completely fixed it is getting better. I have had about 10 treatments on it so far but that area is very complicated. Those nerves, muscles and tendons connect all the way from the fingers through the arm up into the shoulder into the neck and back. Well the shoulder is the connecting point and tends to receive most of the pain. The neck and back and arms need to be worked on to get those muscles and tendons into the right places and working together the way they should, not pulling on each other.
OK, so this is a very simple explanation of the two types of massage in Thailand. I highly recommend staying away from pain pills if you can and finding somebody to figure out what is causing the pain and be very accurate about it. If that can’t be done how are you going to know whether it’s something that can be worked on through massage or some thing that needs to be taken care of another way? From experience and getting various problems fixed, some explained here, and others including whiplash, I have found very often non-intrusive procedures such as massage can take care of problems when you really don’t need a machine to pull your neck apart or someone to pull out the knife or pills. Most doctors you go to will recommend curing problems through their specialty. Good doctors will recommend what they think will be the best treatment. Make sure you get a proper diagnosis first.
Here is an interesting BBC article. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200707-the-birthplace-of-traditional-thai-massage?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2F