Massage:

On June 2nd, the Governor of Colorado signed into law the legislation (SB08-219) that will register massage therapists at the state level, eliminating our current system that licenses city-by-city, if they license at all.

The law takes effect on July 1st and registration is expected to begin in April, 2009.

For several reasons, the bill was changed from “licensing” to “registration”, with almost all of the same provisions:
1. Definition of scope of practice.
2. Title protection.
3. Grandfathering for a period of one year (April 2009-March 2010).
4. A mechanism for consumer complaints

If you’d like to read the full text of the act, here’s a link to the Colorado General Assembly website page that lists all versions of the bill as it passed through the House and Senate. From this page, you can download a pdf file of the Final act.:
http://tinyurl.com/3nxknv

Although some massage practitioners feel there should be no regulation of our field, I personally think that, in the long run, it’s better for us to work collectively, as we did here in CO, to define and regulate ourselves proactively, than to have outside interests define our scope of practice and impose onerous regulation. After reading over several drafts of the bill, I think we got it right. We had the advantage of learning from the mistakes made in other states, we had excellent lobbyists/advisers, and we had coalition members with a wealth of experience to draw upon.

A special thank you to Jean Robinson, ABMP Government Relations and primary author of the bill; Kathryn Stewart, AMTA-Colorado Chapter Government Relations Chair, and Susan Grubb, AMTA-Colorado member, Coordinator of Massage Therapy Legislative Awareness Day, and Manager of the Legislative Alert Network. These three powerful women worked ceaselessly to shepherd us through this process.

Colorado has just passed a regulatory bill (SB-219) for massage therapists that is awaiting the Governor’s signature. Although it started out as a bill for state licensing, it ended up being state registration, with all of the components of licensing, just by a different name. Such is the nature of legislative compromise. Passage of the bill is the result of several years of work by a coalition of AMTA and ABMP. As always when state regulation is on the table, there is a wide variety of opinion about the need or desirability for regulation.

I personally believe that regulation will be good for Colorado. We have many resort towns that have had no regulation at all, and anyone could show up for the ski season and proclaim themselves a “massage therapist”, whether or not they had any training or experience. In my mind, this put vacationing skiers at more risk for receiving substandard, possibly injurious, massage.

I welcome your thoughts on Colorado regulation, or on how things work where you live.