Good Hygiene

Throughout my training, good hygiene has always been a primary concern. My teachers all emphasized that to pass the practical test part of our grades depended on whether we would use the sanitized wipes, and we would fail if we did not. Unfortunately once therapists are no longer graded by their teachers, their practices for their actual clients may or may not be as sanitary as they were in school.

There are many common sense rituals for good hygiene, like washing your hands, but unfortunately there are also many massage therapists who ignore both common sense and good hygiene. Reasons for bad therapist hygiene range from the unavoidable, like body odor on a hot day after working for six hours (or more, especially at a spa), to the outright lazy, like the therapists who do not change their sheets between clients. If you smell perfume or body odor when you lay down on the table, get up, cancel the appointment, and explain your reason; it may make a difference to the next person with an appointment.

A good way to gauge whether or not you want a therapist to work on you is to check a few simple things before, during and after your appointment. 1) Does your therapist wash his or her hands either right before or right after working on your body? Either option is good because washing after shows that it is part of their general practice, and they may have just washed their hands before you came in to see them. 2) Does your therapist change the sheets when you get off the table? 3) Does the massage environment look and smell clean? A therapist with good hygiene would not work in a place that was not equally hygienic.

Good hygiene goes both ways. As a client, do you shower before your appointment? If your feet have been in shoes all day and you can not shower before, please ask the therapist for a wet wipe (we all have them for this very purpose, and if the therapist doesn't not have them, that is not a good hygiene sign). If you have come from work or at the end of the day, eat a mint or chew some gum before going in to your appointment.

Let's all make ourselves as pleasant and clean as possible so that we can relax and enjoy the experience of massage.