WHAT IS “UNIVERSAL PRECAUTIONS”?
“Universal Precautions” is an approach to infection control designed to prevent the transmission of bloodborne diseases such as AIDS, hepatitis B, and C. Universal Precautions was initially developed in 1987 by the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, and in 1989 by the Bureau of Communicable Disease Epidemiology in Canada.
“Universal Precautions” is the need for care givers to consider the blood and body fluids of all clients as potentially infectious and therefore capable of transmitting bloodborne diseases. Therefore without excep- tion, Universal Precautions are always practiced when one’s work brings them into contact with blood and body fluids. Following the principles of Universal Precautions will protect both the care giver and the client; it does not depend on a diagnosis before initiating protective safeguards.
“Universal Precautions” is a very simple concept that is easy to follow. It involves wearing medical gloves when anticipating that the hands will be in contact with body substances. A mask is worn to protect the mouth and mucous membrane if there is spraying of body substances as may occur at an accident site, or in the operating room. The necessity for protective eyewear is usually only needed in specific healthcare set- tings and is worn to protect the mucous membrane of the eye.
Where do we see these precautions being practiced?
In a Massage Clinic.
In a dentist’s office where the dentist, the assistant, or dental hygienist works on the mouth.
In a doctor’s office during internal examinations.
At accident sites where paramedics are working on injured people, and where police
are in contact with blood.
In all medical clinics and Dr appointments.
Always something to keep conscious about when working with human bodies.
REMEMBER THE AMOUNT OF CONTAMINATED BLOOD DOES NOT HAVE TO BE VISIBLE TO THE HUMAN EYE, TO BE CAPABLE OF TRANSMITTING DISEASE THROUGH EVEN THE SMALLEST OF BREAKS IN THE SKIN (i.e a hang nail), OR IF IT COMES INTO CONTACT WITH MUCOUS MEMBRANES (ie the eye or the mouth).
WORK SMART, BE KIND
MOST PEOPLE HAVE NEVER REALLY BEEN LISTENED TO.
THEY LIVE IN A LONELY SILENCE, NO ONE KNOWING WHAT THEY FEEL, HOW THEY LIVE OR WHAT THEY HAVE DONE.
THEY ARE PRISONERS OF THE EYES OF OTHERS: PRISONERS OF LIMITED, SUPERFICIAL AND OFTEN DISTORTED WAYS THAT OTHERS SEE THEM.
THERE ARE NO WORDS TO ADEQUATELY DESCRIBE WHAT IT IS TO BE FREE WITH ANOTHER PERSON. IT IS MOST OFTEN A SENSING THAT SOMEONE WILL LET US BE ALL OF WHAT WE ARE AT THAT MOMENT.
WE ARE AT THAT MOMENT ACCEPTED AND RESPECTED.
WHEN SOMEONE REALLY LISTENS TO US THAT PERSON IS MOVED BY THE INTEGRITY OF OUR EXISTENCE. BECAUSE LISTENING CAN BRING ABOUT SUCH POWERFUL HEALING, IT IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIFTS THAT PEOPLE CAN GIVE AND RECEIVE.
BY CARL A.FABER
ASIS Massage “Promoting Peace, One Body at a Time”
There are always great influences in every profession, and massage therapy has so many to be thankful for.
From Ida Rolf to Moshe Feldenkrais, Fritz Perls to Ron Kurts, our profession has expanded, diversified, and gotten way more detailed at the same time. Luckily, our list is long, and continues to grow.
A resent website has created to to both memorialize and collate the work of one such influential person, Janet Travell.
The site www.JanetTravellMD.com
is new and growing, and is full of some great articles.
Enjoy!
For workshops on Deep Tissue Therapy, NMT, and Connective Tissue, visit ASIS
STROKE: It happens to more than 150,000 Americans a year.
Now Stroke victims are learning to talk again through an approach that trains the undamaged right side of her brain to “speak.” Specifically, it’s a region that controls singing.
For more than 100 years, it’s been known that people who can’t speak after injury to the speech centers on the left side of the brain can sing.
In the 1970s, Boston researchers started to use a sort of “singing therapy” to help stroke survivors speak again.
However, it never caught on much – perhaps because a lot of therapists, not to mention patients, weren’t comfortable singing what they wanted to say. And back then, the science wasn’t advanced enough to show the actual changes in the brain that result from the therapy.
That’s changing fast.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who has had a version of “singing therapy,” astounded everyone by her ability to speak again – albeit so far in single words and short phrases. Nearly a year ago, a would-be assassin’s bullet tore through the speech center in Giffords’ left brain.
Singing Sessions:
Less visibly, an NIH-funded study at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston may be the first rigorous trial of singing therapy. They call it melodic intonation therapy. Post-stroke patients are assigned to a form of conventional speech therapy or to singing therapy. They undergo 90 minutes of treatment a day for 15 weeks.
For more on this story of stroke victims, click here!
For workshops and CEU’s in injury rehabilitation and Massage Therapy,
visit ASIS Massage
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The wisdom of crowds
The strange but extremely valuable science of
how pedestrians behave
IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?
The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.
Instead, says Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority.
That is at odds with most people’s idea of being a pedestrian. More than any other way of getting around—such as being crushed into a train or stuck in a traffic jam—walking appears to offer freedom of choice. Reality is more complicated. Whether stepping aside to avoid a collision, following the person in front through a crowd or navigating busy streets, pedestrians are autonomous yet constrained by others. They are both highly mobile and very predictable. “These are particles with a will,” says Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, a technology-focused university.
For the rest of the story, click on The Economist
Born to Learn!
Our brain is the planet’s most powerful learning machine.
But our current systems of education aren’t doing enough to unlock our true potential.
This is what Born to Learn is all about.
The majority of the material collected on this site,
and presented in the animations is taken from the book
Overschooled but Undereducated, by John Abbott and Heather MacTaggart.
Overschooled but Undereducated synthesizes an array of research and shows how these insights can contribute to a better understanding of human learning, especially as this relates to adolescence. By mis-understanding teenagers’ instinctive need to do things for themselves, society is in danger of creating a system of schooling that so goes against the natural grain of the adolescent brain that formal education ends up unintentionally trivialising the very young people it claims to be supporting. By failing to keep up with appropriate research in the biological and social sciences, current educational systems continue to treat adolescence as a problem rather than an opportunity.
For ASIS Massage classes committed to a love of learning,
visit ASIS Massage Education
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Massage Therapy is a Green Profession:
Green Rankings of 2011
How Green are the largest companies in the World?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/topics/green-rankings.html
ASIS Massage - LEAN GREEN in 2012
