I’m a massage therapist for ten years and a massage instructor for five years. Massage therapists are trained to protect themselves from liability and repetitively reminded we are not doctors and cannot diagnose our clients. We do follow Hippocrates quote “Do No Harm.” Therefore, we cannot determine if it is safe or not for individuals to get a massage. That being said, we follow certain guidelines and established contraindications. As time goes on and more research develops contraindications can/may change. I have noticed a change what is taught now, compared to last decade when I was a student. I would like to share a bit about contraindications for massage.
There are three types of contraindications. Absolute or general, local and medical. Absolute contraindications are conditions they may be temporary, but cannot be a present condition for massage. This could include fever or CHF (congestive heart failure). A local contraindication will allow someone to get a massage, but you would avoid a specific area involved. A broken bone could be massaged above or below the break, but not on the site of the break. The medical contraindication is where kidney disease would fall into. Ironically, this just happened with me yesterday. I had a client arrive, whose husband had scheduled a massage for her as a Christmas present. During her intake I learned she was born with one kidney and since her pregnancy, it is only working at 50%. As a massage therapist, she is medically contraindicated. This means I cannot massage her without consent from her physician. I am not medically trained to determine if her kidney will withstand the effects massage has on kidneys or in her case a kidney. I informed her that if her doctor says it is fine, then I would be more than happy to massage her. However, if her kidneys could not withstand a massage, I would not want to harm her in any way.
The way it was explained to me in school as far as the reason massage could affect a kidney is because massage is encouraging the system and everything is moving through the system faster; therefore at concentrated levels. It’s the same reason massage is contraindicated while someone is under the influence of alcohol. If someone is drinking, I believe the norm is one hour for a drink to go through the system, so if a person had three drinks, I believe it should take three hours for the alcohol to go through their system. (I’m not sure how this changes with multiple drinks, but I will use one hour per drink.) If the person was to get a massage, it may quicken the process and instead of the body processing one drink per hour it will process it all within an hour. My numbers of processing may not be correct, but I believe you can get the gist of what I am saying; the toxins are concentrated. The fear is that someone with kidney disease may not be able to withstand the concentration of toxins going through their kidney. Whether or not a person’s kidney(s) could withstand the effects of massage is out of a massage therapists scope of practice and therefore must be determined by their doctor, preferably their nephrologist.
I hope this helped clarify why massage therapists state and should state that kidney disease is contraindicated. They should be specific in that it is medically contraindicated; simply meaning it is out of our scope of practice to determine if your individual case of kidney disease is indicated for massage therapy - have your qualified physician make this determination, so we do no harm.