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Page 1 of 2 By Harry Jackson Jr.St. Louis Post-Dispatch # After years of luxury or lewd stigmas, service rising in popularity ST. LOUIS — Two years ago, Jeni Wideman, 29, injured her neck in a traffic accident. The injury became another layer of pain atop her diagnosis of migraine and cluster headaches. "I had a migraine that lasted for three weeks," says Wideman, a middle school teacher. Making matters worse, she found that she was allergic to one of the medicines. Dr. David H. Jansen, a chiropractor with offices in Creve Coeur, Mo., suggested visits to a massage therapist who works in his office. "I'd been reading up on massage therapy for some time, looking for different ways to deal with migraines," Wideman said. So when the accident happened, she visited the therapist that same day. She was hooked and has been visiting about once a week since then. "I rarely have to take my migraine medicine anymore," she said. "I'd read that a lot of people had success controlling migraines through massage therapy without medicine. It was just a coincidence that I got into a car accident and needed massage therapy even more than I had previously." Massage therapy has rapidly become a popular alternative treatment for everything from stress to pain relief to rehabilitation. According to the American Massage Therapy Association's 2005 fact sheet, 47 million Americans received massages in 2005 - 2 million more than in 2004. It is estimated that by 2012, the number of massage therapists will have increased by 20 to 35 percent. The upswing in the popularity of massage has followed two decades of newly enacted state laws that recognize massage therapists as allied health practitioners. Nowadays the occupation, whose services once were seen as a luxury in country club locker rooms (or a front for prostitution), is among the fastest-growing vocations of choice for young people seeking their first career, as well as for those who want to start second or supplementary careers. "In the last 20 years, it's become a part of the medical community," said Matt Meyers, a licensed massage therapist with Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "But it had such a terrible stigma, with massage parlors being a cover for everything else, and that's not what it is." Modern therapists, he said, "have gone through the trouble to take the training and the trouble to pass that state board's test - it's grueling." |
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