Ericka Clinton, LMT, director of the Massage Therapy Clinics at Swedish Institute, will be a guest on Martha Stewart Living Radio on Thursday, December 1, broadcast on Sirius XM Satellite Radio at about 9:00 am. As a guest on the Morning Living show, Ms. Clinton will be talking about the benefits of massage and what people should know when they go to see a professional massage therapist.

The Nursing Program at Swedish Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Niamh van Meines as dean.

Niamh (pronounced Neeve) van Meines is a nurse practitioner with a specialty in oncology, as well as a licensed massage therapist and an alumna of the Swedish Institute Massage Therapy Program.

The Nursing Program is scheduled to begin January 2012. Graduates of the program will receive an Associate in Applied Science degree and be prepared for a career as a registered nurse. For details about the program, please visit our website.

The program, with its integrative approach to nursing, will enroll 20 students and is expected to fill to capacity quickly. Classes will be held on the fourth floor of 151 West 26th Street, which includes new classrooms, a modern Simulation Laboratory, study area and student lounge.

We welcome Niamh van Meines to the community of faculty, staff and students at Swedish Institute!

Once again, graduates of the Swedish Institute Massage Therapy Program have an outstanding performance on the New York State Licensing examination.

On the test, administered in August 2011, first-time test takers had a pass rate of 87 percent, compared to 80 percent for all candidates. The combined pass rate for first time and repeat candidates was 82 percent for Swedish Institute alumni, compared to 67 percent for all candidates. We congratulate all of our successful alumni!

Massage therapy students are expected to be familiar with all of the content regarding massage therapy on the Office of the Professions website. Although the guidelines can be obtained in a hard copy, the State encourages students to visit the website because any updates are immediately made to the website.

For an overview of all of the licensed professions in New York State go to the Office of the Professions.

Next month Swedish Institute will launch two new programs—Clinical and Administrative Medical Assistant and Surgical Technologist. Eva Skuka, M.D., will oversee both programs as Dean for Allied Health.

One of the aspects that makes the Medical Assistant Program unique is its education in both clinical and administrative aspects of the profession. Surgical Technologist will focus on the technical knowledge needed in the modern operating room. However, both programs will include the empathetic interpersonal skills so important when helping people through what may be challenging situations.

Both programs lead to an Associate in Occupational Studies degree. For more information speak with an Admissions Advisor on the 5th floor.

Swedish Institute is proud to announce the launch of the Advanced Personal Training Program, leading to an Associate in Occupational Studies degree. Vincent Metzo, chair of the Science Department for the Massage Therapy Program, will be the dean for Advanced Personal Training.

Many people associate Swedish Institute exclusively with massage therapy, and we do have the oldest continuously operating massage therapy program in the United States. What is less well known is that we also have roots in the area of fitness.

Massage therapy, while part of the original curriculum, was part of a system of physical culture and medical gymnastics which Theodore Melander, our founder, learned in Sweden and brought to the United States. He originally founded the Swedish Gymnastics Institute around the year 1913, and taught a system of wellness and healing, which included medical gymnastics, massage and other forms of physiotherapy.

The school became known as the Swedish Institute of Physiotherapy in 1916 and operated under that name until 1954. At that time, it reached a crossroad in the educational process and the owner and director, Lillian Phillips, decided to exclusively pursue massage therapy as the focus of the curriculum at the Institute.

This history is important because the introduction of this exciting program in Advanced Personal Training returns us to our foundation. In developing the curriculum, Vincent Metzo researched the physical culture and medical gymnastics taught in the later part of the 19th century, including some of the rare texts in our library collection. In addition to a historic perspective, the program will offer insights into the latest research, a science based approach to testing, hands-on practice in techniques, and safe and effective program design for all levels of the health-fitness spectrum.

Classes in the new program are planned for the Spring semester.

The need for touch is in the air again. Two stories about the benefits of massage therapy were recently reported in the media. 

On Monday, September 20, National Public Radio ran a story called “Human Connections Start with a Friendly Touch”, which briefly explained how touch affects the body and mind. It began with a description of the sensitivity of the skin, our largest organ. Tiffany Field, PhD, director of the Touch Research Institutes at the University of Miami in Florida, explained that when somebody touches the skin the pressure activates receptors called Pacinian corpuscles. 

The Pacinian corpuscles' signals go directly to an important nerve bundle deep in the brain, the vagus nerve, which goes down to several internal organs, including the heart. The vagus nerve then slows down the heart and decreases blood pressure. 

Another way touch is beneficial is through hormonal changes that were described by Matt Hertenstein, an experimental psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana. He explained that touch can reduce the stress hormone cortisol and increase the neuropeptide oxytocin. "Oxytocin is a neuropeptide, which basically promotes feelings of devotion, trust and bonding," he said. Research shows that oxytocin levels go up with holding hands, hugging, and especially with therapeutic massage. 

Listen to the report or read it on NPR. Comments on their site about this report remind us that touch is not universally accepted, something that professional development class goes into in detail. 

On Tuesday, September 21 The New York Times ran an article entitled “Massage Benefits are More Than Skin Deep.” A report on research sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the article ran in the science section. 

Researchers recruited 53 healthy adults and randomly assigned 29 of them to a 45-minute session of deep-tissue Swedish massage and the other 24 to a session of light massage. All of the subjects were fitted with intravenous catheters so blood samples could be taken immediately before the massage and up to an hour afterward. Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, than the Swedish massage group, and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin, a hormone that stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol. Volunteers also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system. The study was published online in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

Welcome to the Fall 2010 semester at Swedish Institute. It’s an exciting time to be part of our program, as the school community grows and continues to improve all it offers to students. 

Check The Swede regularly for academic information for Massage Therapy and for Acupuncture, for school announcements, Classifieds, grades/schedules and for articles featured in our newsletter, Sinews. 

The Swede is also a handy place for locating contact information for the faculty, staff and academic support. 

All of us here at the school wish you a great semester, filled with the excitement that comes with making discoveries, new friends and connections to future success. 

Bill Ehrhardt 
President

Once when I was supervising an offsite internship for the Massage Therapy Program, I overheard a fourth semester student explain apologetically that he was interested in providing “only relaxation massage”. I interjected that there was no reason to apologize, because a truly relaxing massage could be just as significant as more targeted types of massage such as sports massage or myofascial release. Research into the impact of stress on every level of health and healing continues to shed light on just how important reducing stress can be.

In the current issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine (May/June 2010, Vol 16, No.3) Mark A. Hyman, MD looks at some large drug trials that attempted to demonstrate that targeting risk factors with pharmacological agents would reduce the risk of chronic disease endpoints such as cardiovascular events, diabetes, and mortality. Although drugs aggressively target risk factor reduction—lowering glucose, blood pressure and lipids, for instance—the data from these trials indicate that these efforts consistently failed to show benefit in primary prevention.

“Lipids, glucose, and blood pressure were all effectively reduced in these trials,” Dr. Hyman writes. “But there was no reduction in morbidity and mortality in any of the trials reported, and there were significant side effects.” Dr. Hyman compares the risk factors of elevated blood pressure or cholesterol as “the smoke, not the fire” that creates chronic disease.

Although seventy-five percent of statin prescriptions are written for primary prevention at a cost of more than $20 billion per year, Dr. Hyman points out that, “While there is some evidence for benefits of statin therapy for those with existing disease, there is no good evidence for primary prevention.” He concludes that, “A dramatic paradigm shift is needed in the targets for primary prevention. The era of individual risk factor reduction must now be supplanted by treatment of the etiology of chronic disease through a systems or functional model of diagnosis and treatment.” Dr. Hyman suggests that underlying causes of conditions like cardiovascular disease most likely result from insulin resistance, inflammation, environmental toxins, and stress. He suggests that treatment should target these factors.

Measuring the stress response
Hans Selye, MD, the physician who first wrote about the effects of stress from a medical perspective in 1950, would be very excited about the research going on today. Dr. Selye’s contribution to medicine was defining the general adaptation syndrome (G.A.S), a response which involves virtually every organ and chemical constituent of the human body. In doing so, he proposed a way to measure stress objectively in terms of physical and chemical changes in the body.

In his book The Stress of Life, Dr. Selye predicted that “The study of stress differs essentially from research with artificial drugs because it deals with the defensive mechanisms of our own body. The significance of this kind of research is not limited to fighting this or that disease. It has a bearing upon all diseases and indeed upon all human activities.”

Anticipating Dr. Hyman by more than half a century, Dr. Selye proposed that the cause of conditions such as cardiovascular disease and digestive disorders stem in part from failures in the stress-fighting mechanism of the body.

Strengthening the body’s adaptive response
Integrative health care offers many ways for people to reduce perceptions of stress and reactions to stressors. Yoga, meditation, imagery, exercise, acupuncture and massage can all be part of alleviating stress. Most of these modalities are generalized responses, which naturally enhance the general adaptation response of the body. From Dr. Selye’s viewpoint, they would be a valuable part of the future of medicine, offering “a new type of treatment, whose essence is to combat disease by strengthening the body’s own defenses against stress.”

Alumni from our programs are among the pioneers bringing the benefits of massage therapy and acupuncture to people they see privately as well as in hospitals. Their efforts are being looked at in a new light, as researchers uncover more about the role they play in reducing stress and pain. Far from being apologetic about it, therapists who provide stress reduction while understanding its far-reaching effect will be excited about their future work. They may be at the heart of the emerging field of integrative care that has prevention at its core.


For more information:
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)
Touch Research Institutes
Tiffany Field, PhD. Touch Therapy. New York, NY: Churchill Livingstone, 2000.