Mister Van Manen and Phenomenology.
Reading Max Van Manen's article on Modalities of Body Experience in Illness and Health has been an eye opening experience.  I was quite vague on what phenomenology was and how it could help with my field of work, massage therapy.
As a read along, I started to see how this form of research is really needed in my profession.
" The phenomenological approach asks of us that we constantly measure our understandings and insights against the lived reality of our concrete experience, which, of course, are always more complex than any particular interpretation can portray" (Van Manen, 1998)
What I understand from this is that, as RMTs, we need to constantly use critical thinking to adapt our book/science knowledge to the lived/felt experiences from our patients.   A prime example of this would be how to consolidate the evidence from research to real life clinic, for example, research says that we cannot feel or correct sacral torsions, nor can we prove they actually exists, yet in practice, many of us have found that treating as if a patient has a sacral torsion results in reduction of patient pain and dysfunction.  The research purist will say I am fooling my patients and nothing but placebo effect is shown is such cases, but is that realistic?  What about the Human factor?  That invisible variable that no scientific method has been able to measure and has a tendency to discard.
This is where I see phenomenology helping bridging the gap between our knowledge and our lived experience which is so prevalent in Massage Therapy.
Recently I was conversing with 2 orthopedic surgeons and one anesthesiologist, the conversation migrated toward efficacy of physiotherapy post surgery.  All three physicians have been observing that lately, physiotherapy seems to have lost efficacy.  To them, it seems that, in their push towards evidence based practice in the recent years, the physiotherapy profession has lost it's instinct and ability to treat the human being behind the dysfunction.  Of course, all  three admitted that this is just a vague observation, and not backed with actual data or research, but it did bring up questions on how we still have a long way to go with our approach to research and how we use it to improve our professions' efficacy.