Massage School-Med School Educational Integration: Potomac Institute's Experience with Georgetown

Summary: The NIH NCCAM stimulated relationship building between conventional and CAM schools with their R-25 grants. This article focuses on a pioneering relationship between Georgetown University School of Medicine and the nearby Potomac Massage Training Institute. The impact was felt as profound for students as well as the Institute.

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"We have a relatively big mission for a massage school." Cathy McInturff Ayers, LM, the director of education for Potomac Massage Training Institute (PMTI), was reflecting on the range of pioneering education and research initiatives with which she is involved. Components of her own job description speaks to the size of the mission:

• Member PMTI research committee
• Guest lecturer, Georgetown University School of Medicine CAM Master's program
  
• Lecturer on massage, Georgetown University "Mini Med School" (for the public)
• Developer and supervisor, PMTI Student Peer Program with Georgetown Medical School.

A good deal of this activity was stimulated by a five-year R-25 grant from the NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to Georgetown, with Adi Haramati, PhD, as lead investigator. While the grant period officially ended in April 2006, according to McInturff-Ayers, "the relationship is richer than ever."

Elements of the Relationship

Ayers and Haramati were part of a shared presentation at a 2005 meeting of the National Education Dialogue to Advance Integrated Health Care. The Georgetown grant included development of a masters level program in CAM, in-laying mind-body courses into the curriculum, and, in Haramati's words, helping develop "a peer relationship (between different types of providers) to clarify roles in an integrated care relationship." (For an Integrator look at some outcomes of the mindbody training, click here.)

Haramati's strategic view was that the program with PMTI was a starting place in a step-wise movement toward deeper integration. It was a "focus on the achievable rather than a comprehensive program." Haramati believed that by bringing massage therapists into relationship with medical students that, among other outcomes, the massage students would "quietly instill their caring attitudes" in the medical students.

McInturff-Ayers at at NED reception

"Our massage students experience incredible growth in self-confidence in their interaction with medical school students. They learn to articulate better. They learn to talk clearer about what they're feeling with their hands. They'll walk out of the room and say: 'We knew maybe the same or a little bit more about the musculoskeletal system than the medical students did.' This is a huge growth process for them." (1)

Ayers notes these additional institutional outcomes:

• Curriculum Expanding hours in musculoskeletal pathology, body systems pathology and medical terminology. An already existing requirement for a case study research paper has received additional attention.

• Research  PMTI formed a formal research department and hired Martha Brown Menard, PhD, as research director.