Anya Orbell-McSean

Anya is a graduate of the Princess Pattep College, Naklua in Thailand, where she successfully completed an intensive Thai Government certified four hundred hour full-time course in traditional Thai yoga massage, Thai foot massage, hot herb massage and Swedish massage. She went on to do more than two hundred hours of supervised clinical practice, completing a further course module and graduating at advanced level.

An added advantage of the Thai Government certified course is that rather than simply teaching students how to do a massage,  the training is very much problem oriented, geared at teaching how to tackle the very aches and pains that people commonly suffer. In the final exam, rather than just showing the examiners that they have learnt the massage sequence, students have to show how they would go about treating particular musculoskeletal ailments, at the examiners discretion.

Most of the people who come to Anya for massage are suffering aches and pains of one sort or another. Back pain, shoulder and neck pain and leg and hip pain are the commonest presentations, and skillful bodywork massage is an an excellent way to address these problems. To address a long-standing problem it is preferable to start by having weekly treatments, reducing frequency as the condition improves. Acute (short-term) problems should respond more quickly.

If a joint is painful, the surrounding muscles can go into spasm to try and immobilise the joint, which makes sense, up to a point. The trouble is that the spasm can become chronic (ie long-term) and start to affect other surrounding muscles, and may even worsen the original problem with the joint. Also, when a muscle contracts it shortens, and this can pull the skeleton slightly out of alignment, particularly if the problem is just on one side of the body. This in turn can affect other muscles further away from the original site of the problem, causing them to go into varying degrees of spasm as well, a bit like a cascade effect. Meanwhile the overall level of pain steadily worsens and life becomes a misery.

A skillful massage, using techniques that can get deep down into the affected muscles, can be a very effective way of addressing these problems. With her thorough training, using the specialised techniques of Thai massage, Anya has much experience at tackling all sorts of aches and pains, whether deep-rooted or superficial.