Dizzy Chair Massage

A client stopped in last week a bit worried about her neck. She had been on vacation, feeling very tight in the neck and shoulders and stopped for a chair massage.
Eager to get rid of the tension, she asked for a 30-minute massage. Toward the end of the massage, she started to feel faint and had an overall feeling of serious un-wellness.
“I thought I was going to die,” she said. “I felt terrible. It took several minutes of just sitting to feel like I was getting better.”
She wanted to know if I had any idea why she felt so bad.
Oh boy. Great. Just ask me.chairmassage  I have never seen anyone get sick from a chair massage. During classes the instructors have mentioned that rarely a few folks might experience a low blood sugar after a chair massage. But that’s really it.
And my client had eaten about a half-hour before her massage.
I suggested that if the massage was the cause of her spell, perhaps the headrest was in a tilted back or too far forward position, compressing her suboccipitals.
But the client said the position of the face cradle felt fine.
Another problem might have been if the therapist was using pressure directly into the neck, rather than at an oblique angle, and pressed on the vertebral artery. Stepping off the massage chair and sitting down in a chair for a few minutes would dissipate the feelings.
But heck, I really have no idea because I wasn’t there. Her experience was odd.
Her therapist, she said, was very attentive and very surprised that she didn’t feel well. She sat with her, gave her some water, and offered to call an ambulance. My client said no, she would be fine. And in a few minutes she was. But what happened?
I would like to know if any therapists have ever seen this sort of reaction from a chair massage. Or is it possible it was not related to the massage?
Here’s my very speculative guess as to what happened, barring other causes. This particular client has a very prominent bilateral knot at C2-C3, a souvenir of an old car accident. If pressure was placed directly into the neck from a standing position, it is possible the vertebral artery was compressed. Vaso-compression can cause a myriad of sickly feelings.
My only experience with this was with another therapist when I worked at a spa. Her client came out of her session and had to sit in the hallway for about 20 minutes to recover. She also had a knotty laminal groove near C-3.
After we both helped the client recover and she left, the other therapist and I went over the work done on the neck. My therapist co-worker had stood over the table and with her arms straight down had pressed directly down into the knot in an effort to release it, a method she used on other knots in the back and legs.
This stance is not only bad for the client; it also loads tension on the therapist at about C-6-C-7. Done often enough, it can create numb arms and hands in the therapist as well as unpleasant symptoms in the client.
My co-worker, of course, had just adapted a way of treating knots in one area to another and wasn’t very studied on neck release techniques. I showed her how to treat the neck with oblique angles, anywhere from 35 to 55 degrees to the prone client. This technique, of course, requires the therapist to bend knees and unlock joints in the arms and back.
The oblique approach is healthy body mechanics for the therapist and client as well, and it applies to chair or table treatments. Oblique pressure rises from the feet pushing on the floor, with the joints relaxed rather than locked. Basic? Yes.

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