Why Use the Project for Open Education in Massage?

By Sue Shekut, Owner, Working Well Massage, Licensed Massage Therapist, Certified Wellness Coach, ACSM Personal Trainer

For those massage therapists that are interested in learning more about our profession without shame or blame, check out POEM!

What is POEM? From the website: POEM is the Project for Open Education in Massage (POEM). POEM is a community-supported, open-access resource providing educational materials, learning experiences, reference works, and interactive discussion to meet information needs of stakeholders in the community of massage.

A huge thanks to Ravensara S. Travillian for creating POEM! Learn more about Ravensara here. A few highlights of her bio excerpted from the POEM website: Ravensara is a massage practitioner and biomedical informatician, aka an information scientist which means she studies how information is gathered and collected, evaluated, stored, managed, and shared with others. Her doctoral dissertation was in comparative anatomy informatics (extremely useful for massage therapy!).

Ravensara is not just a researcher, however. She practiced massage at the former Refugee Clinic at Harborview Medical Center  from 1991-1998. She also has been in private practice with people living with the sequelae of stroke, and with women in high-risk pregnancies, as well as veterans living with PTSD from 1992-present.

She taught massage research literacy at the Brian Utting School of Massage (now Cortiva Institute) from 1996-2002. And,  from 2008 to 2009, she wrote the Somatic Research column for Massage & Bodywork Magazine. She now serves on the Best Practices Committee for the Massage Therapy Foundation.

One of the things I like about Ravensara is that in her comments and posts, she strives to be respectful of all, clear in her communication and is not judgmental nor shaming of others. POEM reflects those qualities and is an amazing source of info and a safe place for massage professionals to share and learn from each other.

Why POEM?

Excerpted from the POEM website: POEM is intended to:

• provide a central, universally-accessible repository for existing knowledge about evidence-based biopsychosocial massage;
• provide semantically-integrated tools and views on knowledge about massage and other foundational domains that stakeholders in the community can use for learning and teaching purposes;
• promote communication and build bridges with other healthcare professional disciplines in order to help the patient-centered care team work together more effectively;
• generate new information from the mashup of different existing bits of knowledge;
• provide a sense of pride and accomplishment in members of the community at the cumulative body of evidence-based massage knowledge; and
• provide a safe and empowering place for discussion of and learning about biopsychosocial massage.

Frequently Asked Questions and answers about POEM (excerpted from the POEM website):

1. What is the main purpose of POEM?
2. Do you have to be involved with massage therapy in some way in order to add to the site?
3. I consider myself a spiritual or religious person. Am I welcome here?
4. I’ve never been especially skillful at book learning. Will I be left out here?
5. Why can’t I see what I’ve added right away with some of the things I’ve entered?
6. Why are you monitoring so much on the site before allowing it to be displayed?
7. But aren’t you limiting my freedom of speech?
8. If you don’t get targetted donation levels, will the site still be available for use?
9. What do I do if I’m having problems using your site or if I see someone abusing it (e.g., trying to use it to sell to MTs)?
10. Will there be more features added to the site in the future?
11. How do I add graphics?
12. How do I add links to external pages?
13. Why do you have a bear as your favicon?
14. If I have added content, but it is not yet showing on the site, can I still edit it?

Questions about POEM Content:

1. What is a Massage Wiki?
2. What are e-Books?
3. What is a Research Article Analyis (RAA)?
4. What is a Massage-CAT?