For more than two decades, Steve Livingston has fought to legitimize massage therapy.
He knows massage parlors get a bad reputation when some are found to be fronts for prostitution, and he knows, too, that the sheer number of businesses out there offering massage services makes it difficult to know who is trained and who is not.
A state law enacted three years ago was supposed to finally curb prostitution rings masquerading as massage parlors as well as protect consumers from the under-trained or unqualified.
But critics of this law, like Livingston, say it has done neither.
The law requires anyone who wants to be a message therapist to receive training and pass a state certification test. Some massage therapists in business before the law was passed were grandfathered in if they provided paperwork before July 1 this year. Now everyone must follow the regulations.
The major flaw, according to the critics, is that the law applies only to those calling themselves massage therapists.
Those calling themselves a masseuse or a masseur are exempt from the law. No training is required, no exams and no oversight. Those businesses can cut into the opportunities for Livingston, who helps run Keefer Professional Massage with his wife, Nancy Lee D. Keefer. Both are certified massage therapists.
“Would you go to a doctor who didn’t have a medical degree?” Livingston asked, referring to businesses that have untrained people offering massage services.
State law
Indiana law requires an aspiring massage therapist to successfully complete a massage therapy school or program that provides 500 hours of supervised classroom instruction and hands-on training. The school or program also must be in good standing with the state.
Therapists also must pass a certification test provided by the State Board of Massage Therapy, which is part of the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency. According to the licensing agency’s website, there are 193 people in Fort Wayne who are either active certified massage therapists or awaiting a decision on their application.
“They are not required to hold certification unless they call themselves massage therapists,” Tasha Coleman, the director of the Board of Massage Therapy, said of the certification process. “The statute protects people calling themselves massage therapists. It’s title protection.”
But that is much too loose for many in the field.
“It does not make us happy,” said Jennifer Irving, first vice president and a past president of the Indiana Chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association.
Irving’s organization fought for a law that would require all massage therapists to be licensed instead of certified. That would impose even more restrictions on who could practice and would also provide more consumer protection, said Irving, a certified massage therapist who works at the Lotus Alternative Pain Center in Muncie.
She would also like the law to require those using terms such as “masseuse,” “masseur” and others to be licensed.
43 states
Indiana is one of 43 states that require some type of certification for massage therapies. Neighbors Illinois and Ohio require massage therapists to be licensed, while a law passed in Michigan will require massage therapists there to be licensed sometime in 2011.
“Therapists who take their work seriously, wherever they’re working, they invest a lot of time and money into it,” Irving said. “We would really like to see this law be what it should, which is licensure.”
Sen. Patricia Miller, R-Indianapolis, is the author of the bill passed in 2007 that required message therapists to be state certified.
She said hearings for the bill were filled with long, contentious debates and that many of those in massage therapy could not come to a consensus on what they wanted included in the bill. Some wanted certification, others did not, Miller recalled.
“We could not get agreement on massage therapists themselves,” Miller said. “The intent (for the bill) was for title protection, particularly related to prostitution and those calling themselves massage therapists who were not massage therapists.”
The bill was also not written to include everything related to the massage business, Miller said. That’s because, on the whole, a massage is less likely to be harmful, she said.
“It’s not a danger like brain surgery,” she said.
The law, though, provides no protection for either the massage therapist or the consumer, Irving contends.
“It took any kind of teeth out of the law,” Irving said.
Whether prostitution has been curbed is unclear.
In May, a 54-year-old Fort Wayne woman was arrested at a spa off Lima Road as part of an undercover police sting. In March, a certified massage therapist was arrested on the same charge in Valparaiso as part of another sting.
Outside the state law, Fort Wayne has tried to impose stricter regulations on massage parlors to combat prostitution.
Every massage parlor is required to register with the city, providing photos and fingerprints of all workers.
Though the city did not provide numbers of how many massage parlors were registered, the one busted off Lima Road in May was registered with the city.
Enforcement issues
Both Irving and Livingston said they do not believe the state certification law is being enforced as it should.
Is someone offering “therapeutic massages” subject to the law? Irving believes such a person should be, even if the service is not termed “massage therapy.” She calls the massage landscape in Indiana a “buyer beware” situation.
It takes training to massage certain people, like a pregnant woman or a leukemia patient, both Livingston and Irving said.
“It can be pretty hard to screw up a massage, but if someone does a deep tissue massage out of ignorance on a leukemia patient, they can bleed to death in a matter of hours,” Livingston said.
Livingston sees shops with the same equipment he and his wife have. These shops offer similar services, but without trained staff.
“What they’re doing is trying to skirt the law by calling themselves all these other things, but what they’re actually doing is massage,” Livingston said.
Enforcing the law requires the public’s help, according to Molly Butters of the attorney general’s office, which looks into such matters.
“We need to learn about situations in order to take action,” she said.
So far, though, no businesses in Fort Wayne have been found to be violating the law.
