"Given the physically demanding work many of our employees engage in day to day," writes city communications director Nicole Clegg, "the city sees value in alternative medicines as they have been proven to help improve the health and overall well-being of our workers."
For those of us who don't work for the city, an increasing number of intriguing alt-health options are still out there. In the last couple years, the converging realities of plateauing unemployment, diminishing insurance coverage, and increased interest in services has forced the city's bodyworkers into establishing creative new methods in providing affordable services. While some standard economics would suggest that the first solution to the accessibility issue is to lower the cost of the work, many alternative health practitioners are reluctant to simply drop their prices.
Roger Mayo, a Downeast School of Massage graduate who has been operating a private practice since 2002, offers one suggestion to balancing accessibility while keeping his practice afloat. "I've added this thing called the 30 Minute Miracle, where I work on people's shoulders, necks, and backs." Mayo charges $35 for 30 minutes, consistent with his hourly rate of $70. While the tactic has stabilized his business some, the results haven't been entirely miraculous.
"It's been okay. It's a lot tougher to build a practice if you're working on your own. I was doing very well with it, but when the recession set in it started to dwindle. I do very little massage now, I had to go out and get a job, just to survive," he says.
Spencer, too, supports her practice with a second job as a bartender, where she encounters a vast group of Portland's underinsured workers. "I've done a discount for service-industry people. I feel like the majority of the people in town don't have health insurance and they're just using their bodies to an extreme where they may need it more than a lot of people," she explains. "Everybody needs it, but because I'm associated with (the service industry)," she says, "at times I just think it's the nice thing to do."
In addition to being another component in a successful business model, many in the industry see promoting community accessibility as an integral facet of their work. This makes sense as a general business interest; providing visibility to the benefits of the practice helps the field to grow. Additionally, however, many practitioners in Portland feel an ethical compulsion as well.
One of them is Sage Hayes, a 37-year-old holistic massage therapist who discovered the practice through a roundabout path: "I was really interested in the experiences people had, whether they were about oppression — racism or homophobia or poverty — and how they get lodged in their bodies.
"As much psychotherapy as people were going to, it wasn't necessarily getting into the body stuff," Hayes says. "I became a licensed massage therapist so I could go on and study somatic work, which is about justice and (eliminating) trauma in the body." Because Hayes says her work attempts to identify the manifestations of fear and imbalance in the body, she treats both permission and accessibility as unified themes.
