Hello all,
Can anyone advise me please. A colleague of mine had a treatment recently during which her feet began sweating profusely - to the poin where the therapist was having to dry his hands. She was very uncomfortable and unable to relax. The therapist told that her body was detoxing, but she's is worried this is going to happen everytime she has a treatment.
I've not experience this happening when giving a treatment - any suggestions?
Thanks
Wesam
Well, this is really for the therapist to make sense of this and deal with it, but your friend should not be embarrassed, health is too important. The body does work in strange ways, helping it is often a grubby process, but the price is worth paying.
The therapist thinks so, and lets face it, most experienced practitioners have to deal with far worse. I have patients who gurgle, fart, have to run to the loo, belch, stink, burst out in tears, come out in rashes, diarrhoea, fevers and flu, and produce discharges from every single department. When things leave the body, that's a result - some patients aren't nearly so lucky.
For now it is probably something the body has to go through, in time it will pass as things move on. She probably feels better already in some way, no?
This is all to be welcomed, so please reassure your friend, and get her to ask the therapist what is going on in his terms.
The bottom line is - much better out than in, well done, and stick with it!
Hi kdvp, thanks for the response.
Her therapist had answered the question which was the same as I'd given her - body detox.
While we as therapists may be used to all manner of reactions from clients, the clients themselves may not be comfortable with their reaction.
What she was looking for was reassurance that she is normal and not some mutant whose feet are going to shower anyone who touches them 🙂
Wesam
What she was looking for was reassurance that she is normal and not some mutant whose feet are going to shower anyone who touches them
I'm not sure what will suffice here - who can guarantee that this won't happen many more times?
It's really down to the diplomacy and preparedness of the therapist to create an environment where this is okay and even welcome. Also he must reiterate the message that this is so important, but needs to frame this in terms of his own understanding of what is happening. There may also be self-help measures eg homework with epsom salts foot-baths, but again they need to accord with the therapist's philosophy.
While we as therapists may be used to all manner of reactions from clients, the clients themselves may not be comfortable with their reaction.
This is true, and may be beyond our control, for example if somebody was yelled at as a child for bed-wetting, it may be very difficult. That's an extreme example, but body-image or self-confidence issues can create all kinds of problems too.
It helps if the patient takes the therapy seriously - I'm amazed how people will sometimes balk at having safe and painless manual therapy for a problem but then go for surgery for the same thing 'to see if that helps first'. I'm not sure how to convince these people that this isn't the logical way ahead, and sometimes it isn't right to try, so really they have to make up their own minds.
In other words, if your friend has reservations about the therapist, the therapy or its effects, then to an extent she has to figure this out for herself and decide what she wants from life. There are limits to how far to press any message.