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She’s got the touch

Posted on | October 7, 2009 | 344 views |

Mobile therapist takes massage and message to Ohio State departments

By Julia Harris

When Stephanie Schleappi tells you she feels your pain, she’s not just trying to be nice. More likely, she’s got her fingers right where it hurts and is working hard to loosen things up.

As a licensed massage therapist, Schleappi knows pain. And since a good part of her job with the University Health Connection, Ohio State’s onsite health care clinic for faculty and staff, entails giving chair massages to employees all over campus, she knows better than anyone the pain that plagues this university.

“People are getting tighter and tighter and tighter, just sitting at the computer all day,” Schleappi said. “I see it happening at a younger and younger age. Computer use is so hard on everyone, and it’s very rare that people know how to position themselves or take care of themselves.”

For more than 10 years now, Schleappi has been what she and Stephanie Cook, medical director for the UHC, call an “Ambassador for Medical Massage,” introducing a diverse spectrum of people to the benefits of medical massage therapy.

Cook knows first-hand the magic in Schleappi’s fingers. “The reason she works here is because she fixed my headaches,” she said, grinning, and touched the side of her neck, the tense network of ropy scalene muscles just under the lapel of her blazer.

“There’s so much musculoskeletal pain in our university population because there’s so much desk work,” Cook said. “Massage can take care of many ailments and reduce the amount of medicine we have to do. At the very least it can be a great adjunct to medical management.”

Cook is the first to admit that traditional medicine doesn’t have all the answers for everyone. She has been active in working to expand the coverage for health plan members when it comes to alternative and complementary medicines like massage and acupuncture.

“What Stephanie does as a member of our clinic is introduce massage as a therapeutic modality for people who haven’t experienced it before or who can’t afford the $20 co-pay for an outside massage therapist,” Cook explained.

And to Schleappi, that’s one of the best parts of her job. “I enjoy working with such a diverse group of people, many of whom have never had any type of massage and don’t know what it can do for them,” she said. “I try to give people information they can use, because even with just a few pieces of knowledge people can really make a difference for themselves.”

Schleappi is passionate about the benefits of medical massage because she has experienced them firsthand. A few years before going to massage therapy school for licensure in 1997 — she used to work in newspaper production — she was hit by a truck while riding her bike.

“I’m lucky I wasn’t seriously hurt, but I did have to figure out how to take care of myself, and medical massage really helped,” she said. “I’d never done it before, so I became really interested in it.”

So interested, in fact, that she enrolled in what is now the American Institute of Alternative Medicine here in Columbus. Seven hundred hours and a two-part licensure exam with the state medical board later, she was ready to go.

“I tell people, you know you’re doing what you’re supposed to do when doors aren’t just opened for you, they’re created for you,” she said.

So now she’s opening doors across campus and bringing her rolling therapy chair and her careful kindness to bear on the backs and shoulders of Ohio State employees. She works on 15-20 people a day, she says, and even though everyone is different, she almost always starts with the trapezius muscle — the flat, triangular muscles of the shoulder and upper back — because almost everyone hurts there.

And though she tries to limit how much talking she does while working on a patient, she does try to impart some wisdom about body alignment, balance and breathing techniques.
“It’s amazing how much work can get done in 10 minutes,” Schleappi mused. “It’s rewarding to have my hands on some real problems and be able to make a tangible difference.

Because I’m not just interested in pulling bodies out of the river, I’m also interested in going upstream a bit and keeping them from falling into the water in the first place.”

Massage by ball

Licensed massage therapist Stephanie Schleappi suggests that a simple tennis ball or other small rubber ball can be a simple and inexpensive way to self-manage sore areas of the shoulders and upper back.

Basic instructions: Stand with your back flat against a wall. Lean your head forward and drop the tennis ball down between your back and the wall. Position your body so that the ball is against the inner edge of your shoulder blade. Bend your knees so that the ball rolls slowly over the muscles along your shoulder blade. When you hit a sensitive area of muscle, hold the position for a count of 10 before moving to the next tender area to repeat the process.

Repeat instructions for other shoulder. The entire procedure should take only two minutes to do. The area should become less sensitive each time you do it. Other recommendations include applying heat for 15 minutes before and after treatment and drinking three or more extra glasses of water on the day you do the treatment to flush toxins out of your system.

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