Mica Rosenow, PhD, LMT

Evidence becomes propaganda when its persuasive use outruns what the evidence can actually establish.

The data can be accurate. The analysis can be legitimate. The research can even be good.

The problem can happen afterward.

A descriptive finding becomes a causal explanation. An association becomes a mechanism. A modeled possibility becomes an expected outcome. A reasonable professional practice becomes an “evidence-based” intervention.

With each step, uncertainty disappears and certainty increases, not because new evidence was produced, but because the finding is being translated into a message.

There is nothing inherently wrong with advocacy. But advocacy and evidence are not interchangeable, especially when those messages shape professional education, policy, regulation, or standards of practice.

We should be asking:

What does the evidence actually allow us to conclude?

And when someone says an intervention works:

Compared with what?

A policy may be reasonable. A recommendation may be prudent. An intervention may be worth trying.

But those are different claims.

Our responsibility isn't just to collect good data. It's to make claims no larger than the evidence supporting them.

Having data does not mean we have evidence.

Massage therapy generates an enormous amount of data through ordinary industry interactions: membership surveys, practitioner surveys, complaints, disciplinary processes, continuing education, conferences, online communities, business platforms, and other routine professional activities.

Those data may contain incredibly important information about our profession. But we need to be much more critical about what happens when information collected within an industry ecosystem becomes the basis for claims about massage therapists, clients, or the profession itself. Especially if each source is basically sampling the same small group of people repeatedly.

Professional associations and nonprofit organizations have missions, boards, members, policy positions, reputational concerns, and organizational priorities. For-profit businesses have commercial interests. That does not make their data useless or their intentions unethical. It does mean these are not inherently neutral research environments.

There is also a meaningful difference between collecting information for organizational purposes and conducting research designed to produce generalizable knowledge.

If information gathered through ordinary professional interactions or industry surveys is going to be analyzed and presented as evidence, we should be asking: What was the original purpose of collecting it? What did people understand they were contributing to? Was the sampling appropriate for the claim being made? Were alternative explanations considered? Was there appropriate ethical oversight? Are the limitations being presented as clearly as the conclusions?

And when the subject involves harassment, sexual behavior, misconduct, trauma, complaints, or occupational vulnerability, those questions become even more important.

The answer is not to make sensitive industry data publicly available. Protecting participants and restricting access may be ethically necessary.

But protecting the data is different from protecting the interpretation.

If industry data are used to tell us what is happening in massage therapy, the resulting claims need to be presented in ways that allow meaningful scientific scrutiny. Methods matter. Sampling matters. Comparators matter. Limitations matter. Ethical oversight matters.

A graph, percentage, report, conference presentation, or repeated industry talking point does not become strong evidence simply because it contains data.

Industry data could contribute enormously to our understanding of massage therapy.

But we need to stop treating "we collected information" and "we established evidence" as though they mean the same thing.

They don't.

If I could go back and know all of my experiences would have led to studying the nervous system, coercion, consent, and safety through touch....

I would have taken more detailed notes across environments.

About 80% of U.S. massage therapists that responded to my study believed their experiences classified as client-initiated sexual harassment sometime in their career.

About 40% said they were exposed in the last year from when they completed the study.

This was the first time in history US therapists were polled as part of academic research.

Man, oh man. I've got LOTS of feelings about this.

This was the first time in history U.S. therapists were polled about their sexual harassment experiences as part of academic research.

If I could go back and know all of my experiences would have led to studying the nervous system, coercion, consent, and safety through touch....

I would have taken more detailed notes across environments.

About 80% of U.S. massage therapists that responded to my study believed their experiences classified as client-initiated sexual harassment sometime in their career.

About 40% said they were exposed in the last year from when they completed the study.

I'm not a Massage Therapists have a responsibility to concern themselves with fighting trafficking person.

I AM an everyone needs to recognize all the shades of coercion person though.

Learning about it in extreme cases means we can recognize how it is incorporated in other environments to ensure compliance.

Beyond Physical Force: How Human Traffickers Use Coercion Counter Human Trafficking webinar, exploring the element of coercion.

I am pleased to share the completion of my doctoral dissertation, Beyond Boundaries: A Psychometric Study Advancing the Measurement of Client-Initiated Sexual Harassment in Massage Therapy.

Massage therapy presents a distinctive occupational context for understanding sexual harassment. Therapeutic touch, close physical proximity, privacy, and varying degrees of client disrobing are ordinary components of practice. These same characteristics require massage therapists to continually navigate complex physical, interpersonal, and professional boundaries.

My dissertation addressed a fundamental problem in studying client-initiated sexual harassment in massage therapy: before we can adequately understand its prevalence, consequences, and occupational impact, we need a way to measure these experiences that reflects the context in which massage therapists actually practice.

As part of this work, I developed and evaluated the Massage Therapy Sexual Harassment Exposure Scale (MT-SHESv1), a measure designed specifically to assess client-initiated sexual harassment experiences among massage therapists.

The findings reinforce the importance of looking beyond whether sexual harassment has simply occurred and considering the cumulative behavioral exposure practitioners may experience across their careers.

The MT-SHESv1 provides a foundation for continued investigation of client-initiated sexual harassment in massage therapy, including how these experiences occur and how they may affect the practitioners who experience them.

The psychometric validation manuscript is currently being prepared for peer review, with concurrent analyses from the dissertation around specific sexualized behaviors in the treatment room to follow.

There is much more to learn. I am excited to FINALLY begin sharing this work.

It is difficult to lose people who made a substantial difference in our lives.

Dr. Alla Barry taught me an invaluable lesson about reverence and stillness in the cadaver lab. She was patient, kind, and believed in her students until they believed in themselves—me included.

She pushed me toward my interest in nervous system development and variation and what those differences might look like when someone presented in the massage treatment room. She also supported me as her lab assistant in Advanced Human Dissection, working with students preparing for careers in medicine and other health professions.

Alla, along with the very different teaching style of Dr. Mel Mosher, set the bar against which I would evaluate teachers and mentors for years afterward. They taught differently, but both demonstrated something I came to value enormously: command of your subject, genuine intellectual curiosity, passion for teaching it, and enough confidence in your own expertise to make room for students to develop theirs.

I didn't fully appreciate how rare that combination was at the time.

Alla had an extraordinary ability to be deeply knowledgeable without needing to be the most important person in the room. Her passion was obvious, but so was her focus: the work mattered, the students mattered, and their questions mattered. She could recognize an emerging interest in a student, give it room to develop, and help that student see possibilities without needing to make the interest her own.

In fact, I likely never would have gone to IU for the opportunity presented, research in mirror therapy for phantom limb pain in above-the-knee amputees, if Alla and I had not talked through it. After dissecting variations in upper-limb innervation, the opportunity to examine lower-limb innervation offered a unique immersion in anatomical variation across the body.

Alla knew what interested me before any of those things existed. She didn't need to redirect that curiosity to validate her role in developing it. She took it seriously, gave me opportunities to pursue it, and trusted me to decide where it might lead.

There are people who influence the direction of our work, and there are people who teach us how to become the kind of person capable of doing it.

Dr. Alla Barry was the latter.

I am incredibly fortunate that she was one of my teachers.

Alla Barry - Sunday, August 5th, 1962 - Friday, September 4th, 2026 Dr. Alla G. Barry, age 64, of Joplin, Missouri, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on September 4, 2026. Alla was born on August 5, 1962, in Arkhangelsk, Russia, to Captain Grigorii Veretnov and Dr. Nina Veretnova. She received her medical degree...

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I've been thinking about what it actually means for a profession to police itself.

Self-governance assumes there are meaningful mechanisms for accountability. But what happens when the organizations responsible for different pieces of a profession are also interconnected through funding, leadership, partnerships, policy, research, credentialing, or other shared interests?

At some point, it becomes difficult for anyone inside the ecosystem to evaluate the ecosystem itself.

That doesn't mean anything improper is happening. It means independence becomes a governance question in its own right.

Maybe mature self-governance isn't just having systems for policing ourselves.

Maybe it also means periodically inviting people with no stake in the system to look at the whole thing and tell us what they see.

I wonder if massage therapy has spent so much time borrowing legitimacy from healthcare that we've overlooked something we may actually have to contribute:

Embodied consent.

Massage therapists routinely negotiate access to another person's body.

--> Where can I touch you?
--> Where don't you want to be touched?
--> Is this pressure okay?
--> Are you comfortable with this position or level of undress?
--> Would you like this area addressed?

And consent doesn't end with those questions.

Something that was comfortable five minutes ago isn't anymore? We change it.

A yes to one thing isn't automatically a yes to another.

An involuntary physiological response isn't permission.

And changing your mind after we've started doesn't mean it's too late to say no.

Massage exists at an unusual intersection of touch, vulnerability, undress, physiological response, interpersonal trust, power, and communication. Yet we've spent enormous professional energy distancing ourselves from the conversations those circumstances uniquely position us to have.

We've sought legitimacy by emphasizing that massage is healthcare, therapeutic, evidence-based, and nonsexual.

But what if we're overlooking knowledge developed within our own practice?

Consent is specific, contextual, ongoing, behavioral, renegotiable, and withdrawable. Massage gives us a setting in which those principles aren't theoretical—they're embodied.

That doesn't mean massage therapists are already experts in consent. Our profession has plenty to learn from sexuality and consent scholarship, particularly in our education, ethics, boundaries, and response to sexual harassment.

But that exchange should go both ways.

What has working with human bodies taught massage therapy that other disciplines might benefit from understanding?

Maybe professional legitimacy doesn't only come from proving we belong within someone else's framework.

Maybe it also comes from recognizing what we have to contribute.