How leading massage therapists and manual therapists look at psychosomatics.

Psychosomatics, as an objective phenomenon, is no longer in doubt, however, extreme positions on it are still encountered in the provision of psychological and medical care: “to treat the disease only with medical manipulations, and the psychological request only with psychotherapeutic techniques”, “to treat only with medical manipulations everything up to to the question of the meaning of life”, “through psychotherapy to influence everything up to coma and venous bleeding.”

Usually, psychologists assign the maximum role in psychosomatics, although initially these phenomena were described by doctors and physiologists. And there may be an erroneous opinion that this is just a fashionable word, with the help of which the psychologist, experiencing a “feeling of insufficiency” (according to A. Adler), tries to fit into medical practice. But no, specialists working with bodily needs turn to psychosomatics.

Most of all, psychologists who work in body-oriented practices love psychosomatics, which is logical. But how do specialists “on the other side of the barricades” — chiropractors, massage therapists, physical therapists — relate to psychosomatics?

From a physiological perspective, it is obvious that the greatest connection between the psyche and the body is through the nervous and neuro-endocrine systems. At the end of the 19th century, systematic research began to be carried out on the positive effects of massage techniques on…