Does that include the full body wax?

It’s hard to tell what exactly is meant by what insurance companies politely call “massage therapy”, but I can tell you right here that it can’t be found in any medical textbook written after the time of Hippocrates. You may well wonder what disease isn’t there that can not be treated by 30 minutes in a hot sauna followed by a skin transplant from a 3ft loofah at a Japanese spa bath? It’s these kind of questions that probably explain why I do occasionally resist getting bamboozled into writing out massage therapy requests. I will be the first to confess, that whenever I find myself engaged in that unhealthy debate over the dangers posed by statins to modern civilization, or on how green tea cures cancer, I do think of calling up the boys at Atlantis with a special request to beat the rhythms of sweet bejesus out of the naturopath in question.

Do our overwhelmed Infotech office workers know about the retired Bavarian Sambo wrestler working at Java Spa – the one with more tattoos than a Scottish regiment? Did they not hear about the hot masseuse with the paraffin balls? The 3rd degree burns on the once-hairy chest who got carried into the ER last Christmas? Anyway maybe it was just a blistering rumour, but they tell me the apprentice forgot where he put the fire extinguisher.

Had it been an economically viable option, I would not have been surprised if the College opened its own fully-certified Norwegian spa in downtown Ottawa. Even that would fail to convince me. In my book, massage therapy will remain forever an indefinable treatment for indefinable medical conditions – with or without the body wax.