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100: Chronic Symptoms & Other Mysteries (with Ruth Werner & Til Luchau)

Episode Transcript

Summary: When Ruth Werner sought Til Luchau’s hands-on help with a chronic symptom, they stopped by ABMP’s Colorado studio for a fascinating discussion with Darren Buford and Kristin Coverly about what they were learning by working together.  (This special episode is thanks to ABMP.)

Get the full transcript of their conversation on Til or Whitney’s sites: 

Resources:

Whitney Lowe:

The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, and quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with Pocket Suite, and much more. ABMP’s CE courses podcast and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including from both Til and myself. Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking. And we do also want to thank ABMP because today’s episode is a special rebroadcast of an episode of the ABMP podcast where Til and Ruth Werner were guests. The ABMP podcast is hosted by Darren Buford and Kristin Coverly. So let’s sit in on this conversation, and thanks to ABMP for letting us re-broadcast this episode. The Thinking Practitioner 

Darren Buford:

I’m Darren Buford.

Kristin Coverly:

I’m Kristin Coverly.

Til Luchau:

I am Til Luchau.

Ruth Werner:

And I’m Ruth Werner.

Darren Buford:

And welcome to the ABMP podcast, a podcast where we speak with the massage and bodywork profession. Our guests today, as you just heard, are Ruth Werner and Til Luau Ruth is a former massage therapist, a writer, and an NCBTNB approved continuing education provider. She wrote a massage therapist Guide to Pathology now in its seventh edition, which is used in massage schools worldwide. Ruth is [email protected]. Ruth is also the host of the podcast. I have a client who, which runs every other Friday on this very ABMP podcast network. And if that wasn’t enough, Ruth is a columnist and frequent feature writer for Massage and Bodywork Magazine. Til is the author of Advanced Myofascial Techniques, a certified advanced Rolfer and a member of advanced trainings.com faculty, which offers online training in-person seminars throughout the United States and abroad. Learn [email protected]. Til is also the co-host of the ABMP sponsored podcast, the Thinking Practitioner, and if that wasn’t enough. Til is a columnist for Massage and Bodywork Magazine. Hello, Ruth, Til and Kristin. And welcome to the ABMP podcast, a podcast where we speak with the massage and bodywork profession. Our guests today, as you just heard, are Ruth Werner and Til Luchau. Ruthe

Kristin Coverly:

And I’m going to jump in before and add that they’re both CE providers for the ABMP Education Center.

Til Luchau:

Nice.

Ruth Werner:

Yes, we are.

Til Luchau:

Great to be here with you.

Ruth Werner:

It is really fun to be all in the same room at the same time.

Kristin Coverly:

It is. And podcast listeners, we are going to take advantage of this unique opportunity to have both Til and Ruth with us in person, and we’re going to talk about something that they’re working on together. Our topic for our pod today is Getting Comfortable with Mystery. So we’re going to start the conversation by asking Til and Ruth what brings you together in person to our studios today.

Ruth Werner:

I’ll take that on. So many people know that I live with a chronic cough and have done for decades. And last spring I was co-hosting the Back Jam, an ABMP sponsored event with Diane Murkowski and Til was one of the presenters. And he presented a segment on working with the rib cage and during which he talked about having a friend come visit and be the model for this segment, and that he had a chronic cough that he felt had some improvement because of this work. And that made me completely take advantage of my friendship with Til to say, hey, till, how would it be if I came to visit you, and you maybe tried to see if we could get a handle on my chronic cough? And he was a very good sport. And after he figured out that I actually, yeah, I meant it.

Til Luchau:

Yeah. I was like, sure, why not? And then you meant it. I’m like, okay.

Ruth Werner:

And so here we are. I am completely taking advantage of the opportunity to stay with my friend and see all of my friends in the area, but also to get some bodywork to deal with this condition that I have lived with probably since around 96 or 97.

Kristin Coverly:

Yeah, we’ll definitely talk about the bodywork and the techniques, but first, Ruth, I know a lot of people listening are probably asking, do you know the cause of your chronic cough?

Ruth Werner:

Well, yes and no. I mean, I know some contributing factors. So at that time, from the late 90s and up until 2010, I lived in a suburb of Salt Lake City, so I was at 5,000 feet of altitude. We were trapped in some very poor air quality. There’s oil refineries and gravel pits and temperature inversions. And also during this time I was working at a school, I was lecturing probably 12 hours a week. I was singing in a church choir, and I was traveling 10, 15 weekends a year to do eight or 12 hours of lecture over a weekend. And between all of those things, I developed a cough. And in many ways, to me, it seemed that the cough sort of took over from my regular seasonal allergies. I used to have just a really awful seasonal allergies with coughing, with sneezing and runny eyes and itching and all that stuff.

And it was so odd that one year it just seemed to stop. I didn’t have my seasonal allergies anymore, but that’s when my cough developed. And I don’t know what the point to point correlation is. I just noticed that that was a change that happened, but then my cough just didn’t get better, and it didn’t get better, and it didn’t get better. And if I ever get any little respiratory thing, it gets blown way up. So in terms of causes, probably it was a combination of a number of different things. But even after having been away from that environment now for 13 years, I continue to have a cough, and it would be really lovely someday to not have a cough, but I’m not 100% sure that that is ever going to happen.

Darren Buford:

So, Ruth, listeners probably want to know, you did move from the Utah area to-

Ruth Werner:

To the Oregon coast with the best, cleanest, freshest air on the planet.

Darren Buford:

And that didn’t change anything.

Ruth Werner:

It did not change anything. I was hopeful, because I noticed when I lived in Utah, when I could travel to sea level, that to me, the way I described it was like breathing balm. It felt so good to bring in some air that wasn’t hot and dry. But living in Oregon has not made a substantial change.

Kristin Coverly:

And over the years you’ve seen different types of practitioners and received different types of treatments from acupuncture to chiropractic, et cetera. Right. Tell us a little bit about that.

Ruth Werner:

Yeah, so I mean, the first thing that I as a pathology educator wanted to do was rule out worst case scenarios. And so I spent time in the conventional medical community going through lots of tests. They tested my thyroid, I had thyroid nodules. That was really exciting, and a few other things. And after all those tests, you get the call that probably lots of our listeners have had, which is to say, oh, congratulations Mrs. Warner, there’s nothing wrong with you. And I kind of respond by going, oh, that’s awesome. Thank you so much. And it’s better that I don’t have tuberculosis or congestive heart failure or any number of other worst case scenarios, that’s fine. But it didn’t leave me with a lot of options. One year I had some colleagues through the school where I was teaching, so I spent a summer going every week to an interdisciplinary clinic where I would get acupuncture and craniosacral work and chiropractic.

And I think there was another intervention and there was a naturopath there as well. And it felt to me like over the course of that summer, we maybe made some progress, and then it was over, and we weren’t very careful about writing down who did what when, and the benefits subsided. And here I am again. And since that time I’ve continued to go through pretty extensive testing and went through a lot of work at OHSU, Oregon Health Sciences University. They put a scope down to watch my larynx and my swallowing. And they were a little bit appalled when they asked me to speak. And basically they said count to 10 because they wanted to watch the thing on the TV screen. And I went one, two, they’re used to people going as fast as they can because it’s not pleasant to have a garden hose shoved down the back of your throat. But I was fascinated to see what they saw. And they saw I have a tiny, tiny little bit of excursion with a hiatal hernia.

I don’t have reflux, and I don’t have anything else that they could identify. So they basically sent me away saying, yeah, the best we can give you, is it some kind of motor neuropathy. And here work with this speech pathologist, which I did with some success and still have a cough.

Kristin Coverly:

And that leads us to today, where you’re here to work with Til. So Til, talk to us, what’s your thought process when a client like Ruth comes with a chronic condition that may not have an identifiable cause?

Til Luchau:

Those are the most interesting ones to me because there’s always multidimensional factors going on in every symptom. And the times that nothing seems to help, or we can’t figure out how to stop the symptoms that we want to get rid of are the biggest opportunities really for shifting the way we see things, the way we work, and getting really adaptable as a practitioner or really finding a way to work with our clients as opposed to working on them. If there was a magic muscle, I could just massage and stop Ruth’s cough, that would be wonderful. But it is not known.

Ruth Werner:

That’s not how it works.

Til Luchau:

Yeah, it’s not known to me.

Ruth Werner:

Darn it.

Til Luchau:

So if you’re still listening now after hearing that, then I want to try to talk about what I hope does help. And it’s wonderful doing it with you, Ruth, because we are friends and colleagues and you’re an educated practitioner yourself. You’re in the field. So I get to narrate almost to myself. I get to think out loud with you. And that’s kind of the approach I take with my clients, maybe in a different way, but really I’m looking first and foremost to become co-investigators in this question of this mystery that we’re presented with. A symptom that you haven’t been able to find relief from.

Ruth Werner:

And we’re sort of going on this little adventure.

Til Luchau:

Yeah, that’s right. Really, what that’s doing is it’s laying out, or maybe it’s recalibrating the expectations because people want not to cough. They want the shoulder not to hurt, they want the migraine to go away. That’s why they come to us. And we as practitioners want to help them with that. And it’s amazing how often we can. We just do our work and that symptom is gone and yet, and then sometimes-

Ruth Werner:

And then sometimes, there’s people like me, and one of the things I have learned, and you just sort of alluded to it, is the crossover. First of all, chronic cough is not rare. It’s really common. And doctors hate it because it just doesn’t respond to the easy fixes. And there’s so much overlap in the life experience of living with chronic cough as compared to something like living with chronic pain. In the sense that it’s invisible, it doesn’t have a specific cause, doesn’t have a specific way to fix it, and it impacts virtually every part of my decision-making through the day. Now, I’m not trying to suggest that people who live with really severe chronic pain don’t have it bad. And I feel like I have come to a certain level of peace with living with a chronic cough, figured out appropriate accommodations that work for me. But there are similarities to, for lack of a better word, to being stuck with this challenge. And it certainly has given me a different understanding of what living with a chronic illness is.

Til Luchau:

There’s a lot to say about that. Having had chronic symptoms myself that no one could help me with, and those being really influential in my thinking and my work and my approach, there’s a lot we could say about that, including the sense of aloneness or hopelessness or not being believed or being minimized. All those things that can come with, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with you. We’re happy to tell you that.

Ruth Werner:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have a limited bandwidth. And so my goal, and then the goal that I suggest for people who live with a chronic illness, is to understand it’s there. It’s part of what’s on your plate. What we’d like to do is help it be a relatively small part of what’s on your plate, and that your plate is filled up with lots of other things that you love. And that’s not my imagery. I didn’t make that up, someone else made that up. But it works for me. I feel like, in general, I’m pretty good at that. And there are times when it just really, really makes me angry that I’m living with this stupid thing.

Kristin Coverly:

So, Til, talk to us about your process. I know Ruth was first introduced to this idea of from a class you were teaching about working with the rib cage. So I’m guessing, is that where you’re going to start with Ruth, and then you’ll explore and keep trying and do different things? Or tell us a little bit about your treatment planning process?

Til Luchau:

We are a practical culture, body workers, massage therapists. We want to know what to do. We want to know what structure to target, how to do it? How many times to do it? And if we knew that, there wouldn’t be chronic symptoms. I do have a process and the process starts with, again, a relationship, starting this co-investigator relationship in a way that we can discover together what makes the difference. And for me, the difference can go either way. If I can provoke a cough that is really useful information, and similar with a lot of symptoms, like a headache, if I can find a place that increases the headache, I am talking to the headache, to the mechanical factors within the headache. And in theory, if I can make it worse, maybe we can find a way to make it better too. At least we know it’s malleable, it’s changeable. And sometimes that by itself gives people a lot of hope. There’s actually something I can do that changes this intransigent chronic symptom. Whether it’s a headache, a cough, or even pain.

Ruth Werner:

And that feels, to me, especially true when you’re talking about central nervous system involvement, right? Because this is essentially at this point a type of central sensitization, and it is easy to leap to the conclusion, oh, well, swear word, that’s my central nervous system. That’s never going to change.

Til Luchau:

You’re talking about the cough centers in the brain that trigger the physical response of coughing. They’re part of the central nervous system.

Ruth Werner:

Exactly. And historically, we don’t look at that as being very malleable or very adaptive. Once a pattern has become established.

Til Luchau:

How do I massage that, too?

Ruth Werner:

Right, but as we see with the way people are now thinking about manual therapy and chronic pain, maybe we’re not getting rid of it, maybe we’re just turning down the volume and then the central nervous system can maybe step in and reset some trigger settings.

Til Luchau:

Okay. So getting the rapport, getting this co-investigator relationship, trying things together, seeing if we can provoke or relieve it in service of learning about it, but also maybe changing, here’s the big one, the disturbance that causes or the reactivity that happens. If we think about pain for a second, pain is complex. It’s many things, but on one level it’s a sensation, on another level it’s an emotional reaction. All kinds of things rolled in together, and teasing those apart can be really, really useful.

Ruth Werner:

And so I want to explore that. You and I kind of started this a little bit earlier, and I’d love for you to take that word disturbance and unpack that a little bit, because that can mean different things to different hearers.

Til Luchau:

Absolutely. I think of myself, it’s almost a working hypothesis, but let me give it to you. I think of myself as someone who works with disturbances symptoms. The symptom is the proximal experience, let’s say. It’s what we target. We want to try to change it, so that I’m not disturbed, but the reason people come to me is because disturbed, not everybody with a chronic cough comes to me, is the people that are disturbed by the chronic cough comes to me.

Ruth Werner:

It’s the bothersomeness.

Til Luchau:

It’s the bothersomeness of it. It’s what I don’t want to be.

Ruth Werner:

Well, I’ll raise my hand to that.

Til Luchau:

And why should you?

Ruth Werner:

I’m highly bothered by it at this point. I’m tired of having to put a happy smile, and make the mitigations that I make every single day.

Til Luchau:

Which is where it gets complex because there’s so much. The A-word, which I almost never say with clients, is acceptance. There’s so much to say, okay, so if we can’t get rid of it, let’s just work with accepting it. And that sounds like defeat for so many people who are really bothered by what they have going on.

Ruth Werner:

And that’s where I live, right.

Til Luchau:

You’re already working with that. You’re already playing. Yeah.

Ruth Werner:

And I can do it, and I’ve managed to build a career as a speaker, sort of against all odds. But what would it be like if I didn’t have a cough? And I’ll tell you, one of the things that I saw that was a little hurtful to me, it was on Facebook, and it was in a conversation where people were talking about me, and then I happened to stumble across it and someone said, yeah, I went to a class with her, and she was coughing the whole time, and she never covered her mouth. And what is this chick doing teaching pathology? And it felt so awful, and I completely understand it, and I always introduce every class saying, hi, I’m Ruth. I live with a chronic cough. I’m not sick. It makes me feel very, very self-conscious, especially in any kind of face-to-face kind of setting.

Til Luchau:

Ruth, when you cough, does it release and the whole process slowly begins again.

Ruth Werner:

I don’t know for sure that this answers your question. When I cough, it feels like I’m scratching an itch. We were talking at lunch today about people having great big mosquito bite welts, and you can decide, I’m not going to scratch that, but it takes all of your focus to not scratch that for a really long time until your nervous system has something else to pay attention to. And that’s a lot of what this is like. So there’s a relief in the sense of I scratch that itch and I know that that’s not the last time that’s going to happen.

Kristin Coverly:

I want to come back to something you said earlier Til, you mentioned, teasing apart the physical and emotional experience. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Til Luchau:

Sure. Strategically, it might just be as simple as having someone describe what happens when they cough, and really slowing it down to that present moment, body-based experience, which is huge in and of itself. We’re not used to living there, and it takes a while for some of our clients to even know what we’re talking about. But if we can find ways to get people interested in their actual sensations, like, oh, actually… We were playing this yesterday. It starts as a tickle or some kind of sensation deep in here, and I can’t touch it, but it’s in there somewhere, that by myself is an important first step. We have now defined it, described it as a sensation, and it’s not a cough yet. Maybe not even disturbing yet. It’s just a sensation. The basic kind of mindfulness idea that just paying attention to something is a lot in itself, and everything else kind of been built around that.

Ruth Werner:

But the paying attention to it can make it self-fulfilling.

Til Luchau:

Make it self-fulfilling, mean lead to a cough. The other thing I want to do is move the goalpost a little bit. If it’s a long-term chronic symptom, one of the early things we need to do is recalibrate expectations around that and change what’s going to be a satisfying outcome. We come up together with even the idea to investigate and let’s see what happens. And there might be a place in, they’re like, okay, so what would be satisfying? Or what would make this worth it if we weren’t able to find the magic cough muscle and massage it? What would make this time valuable to you? So when talking about the cough is self-fulfilling, and I said this to you, this is awesome. I want this to be a time when you can cough as much as you want. In fact, the more you cough, the more we can trigger it, the more we can self fulfill it in this context, the more helpful it is.

Ruth Werner:

And I acknowledge that eliminating the cough is not a realistic goalpost. It would be awesome, A, to cough less, and B, to have more tools to have a little bit more power over how much it impacts my life.

Til Luchau:

A little more power, have some tools, have a little more power. And you’re a sophisticated client. Everybody kind of knows that. I mean, on some level, people get it. They’re like, oh, you haven’t been able to get rid of this. Maybe there’s something useful here besides just getting rid of it. People are open to that on some level and on another level, if it hurts, we just want it not to hurt. It’s that simple. And that’s really human and really understandable. For me as a practitioner, it’s holding this kind of paradoxical possibilities and goals as we investigate together.

Kristin Coverly:

Yeah, we talked about getting comfortable with the mystery, and that’s for both the practitioner and the client. So we are talking about setting realistic goals and changing the goalpost for the client’s expectations. But talk to us Til about how a practitioner who only wants to help and do the best they can for their client can get comfortable with the idea that you may not be able to find that cough muscle and solve the problem.

Til Luchau:

The practitioner only wants to help. You’re in big trouble. What we really have to do is redefine, again, move that goalpost. What does it mean to help? Honestly, there’s a lot we can do to help anything, anytime, anywhere. And that’s what I am loving about listening to your pathology podcast over the years, is that I see that nuance emerging more and more, that you really do bring in, well, we’re not doctors, we’re not medical people. We’re not actually about trying to fix this, fix this or cure this, or whatever it is. And yet there’s a possibility here for us practitioners to really do some good, really support people really relieve things, really help in many, many ways.

Ruth Werner:

What’s your strategy? What are you doing with your hands?

Til Luchau:

What exactly are we going to do with our hands? We started yesterday. Actually, we started a couple of months ago when you came by a class I was teaching, and we got half an hour or whatever it was just to experiment a little bit. And we did that with you. I think you were lying on the table after a class that I’m just feeling and asking questions, what happens here? What happens there? And we didn’t catch a fish, meaning we didn’t provoke a cough.

Ruth Werner:

And I was surprised because I fully expected you were working very specifically in my anterior throat, which is where I reported that’s where it feels tied up to me. And nothing happened.

Til Luchau:

Nothing happened. We didn’t find a spot that made you cough, which I’m not surprised about because the thing that coughs is our throat, but there’s a whole lot more involved. And like the story I told in the back jam, it was my friend who’s in Denver seeking a thorough eval for a long-term chronic cough. For him staying at my place, helping me with some filming, and just put him on the table for a demo and working on his ribs. He goes, whoa, that’s my cough in there. I can feel that. And so he made a somatic or felt connection of how this thing was someplace we didn’t expect it. The side of his ribcage was actually very connected to his impulse to cough, though I didn’t necessarily expect to find something in your throat, even though it’s your throat that coughs it would be connected. But we started to rule that out. Yesterday we worked in an upright position, which is a lot more relevant to coughing and speaking and breathing and those kinds of things than lying down on a classic massage position.

And I was, again, experimenting to see if we could find a place that would either provoke or relieve the ongoing urge to cough. And the focus was what for my hands was what moves and what doesn’t. And we started with some outer structures of your shoulders, your rib cage, the upper ribs, layers of skin and superficial fascia around your throat, neck, back. And then we moved into some deeper scaling movement with you gently turning your head. And I was feeling mobility differences left and right. So that was kind of curious to me. So then I was coaching you through some gentle head rotation while I would coax those, mild fascial compartments otherwise known as muscles, to glide evenly left and right. There was a difference. And my interpretation was, I was getting good feedback from you verbally, non-verbally, that seemed to feel interesting or good enough to continue. And we played with that. And as we are going through this, I noticed that you were not coughing.

We had you exploring with the origin of the cough, describing to me where you felt it start. We were experimenting with movement where you were feeling the possibility for movement. And we learned a few things about this. What would you call it? Electric.

Ruth Werner:

I had identified a portion of my neck that felt like a band of static. And then after the neck work that you did, it felt, what was the word we used? I think I said it felt scrubbed.

Til Luchau:

Scrubbed.

Ruth Werner:

It felt fresh and still does.

Til Luchau:

Yeah. We identified some of the sensations that arose with the beginning of the disturbance. We shifted that to a different sensation and even a different image or different metaphor there. And we called it a day.

Ruth Werner:

Well. And then shortly before we wrapped up, I got started again. I mean, I inhaled the wrong flick of saliva or something. I don’t know what it was, but it was a really hard one. It was made up for all that lost time. And I swear to God, it was not on purpose, but it was a much more severe, long-lasting, it was a fit. And I was so angry. I was so angry because I thought I was almost there.

Til Luchau:

I was almost enjoying you not coughing. And then, yeah.

Ruth Werner:

And that’s another aspect of the disturbance issue, because it’s not just living with a cough. It’s being really mad about it.

Til Luchau:

And again, because I’m talking about you here, I can narrate what was going on for me there. I wouldn’t necessarily say this to my client, but my role at that moment was to normalize that, and to help give you other options to thinking like, oh, now I blew it. And the metaphor I offered was, okay, so you get a massage, you’re driving home, someone cuts you off in traffic, and you get tense again. Have you totally wasted all the value from the massage? Probably not. Maybe in this case-

Ruth Werner:

But I had some pushback to that.

Til Luchau:

We had some discussion about that. Yeah.

Ruth Werner:

Because having a bad driver is an external event. And as someone who has had bad experience with some frequency, you get a lovely massage and something happens on your way home, and it rattles you. And then you have to sort of consciously decide to go back into equilibrium. But for me, the cough rightly or wrongly, or what’s the word I want, usefully or not usefully, my cough is part of me. It’s internal to me. And you said, well, okay, so stop your digestion. That’s part of you. Can you do that? And obviously not. I cannot.

Til Luchau:

You’ve got into a fun mental. Yes.

Ruth Werner:

Yeah. But I can take conscious actions to influence my digestion, and probably still digest things. Anyway, it was a little frustrating.

Til Luchau:

And you’re saying maybe that you don’t feel that in relationship with your cough?

Ruth Werner:

Not enough. I mean, I take a lot of steps and I manage my cough pretty well, which is why I can do the kind of work that I do. But there are times when I would give a lot to not have a cough.

Til Luchau:

For me as a practitioner, it’s an interesting moment because it’s so easy also to fall into being the ambassador for hope, to being the one who’s going to hold that point of view and reassure you and find reassuring metaphors maybe that you’ve found ways to debate a little bit. So then we could get into a debate, is it going to be hope or is it going to be helplessness? Which, instantly, we’ve almost solidified our roles. I’ve taken the hope position. You’re stuck with defending the other side.

Ruth Werner:

And then how much am I holding onto this just because it’s part of my personality now, right? And I don’t want to be that person, but I do want to be realistic.

Til Luchau:

There you go.

Ruth Werner:

Again, I mean, this takes me back to the conversation we had about fibromyalgia years ago, not years, months and months ago. Last year sometime, you and I and Angie, did a podcast on fibro and talked a lot about what it is to live with chronic pain and have that chronic pain become so much a part of your identity. That is another obstacle to letting it go. And I wonder how much of this is true of me.

Darren Buford:

Beautiful. Does anybody have anything else before we bring the podcast at close that you want to say?

Til Luchau:

If you have another session or two, we’re going to do before you go. Briefly, I’m going to broaden the lens. I think we’ll find out, but I think we’re going to investigate more places in your body, more positions.

Ruth Werner:

I can’t wait.

Til Luchau:

It sounds all right to you.

Ruth Werner:

Yeah.

Darren Buford:

Listeners, I hope you loved this as much as I did. This has been fantastic to actually work through the process of bodywork sessions and to think fairly intensely from the perspective, hearing the client out, and hearing Til’s approach to how they will be working together. So I want to thank our guests today so much, Til Luchau and Ruth Werner. To find out more information about both of them, visit ruthwerner.com and advanced-trainings.com. Thanks Til, Ruth, and Kristin.

Kristin Coverly:

Thanks everybody.

Darren Buford:

Thank you for having us.

Kristin Coverly:

And thank you both for being with us and for that really open and honest conversation. Your willingness to share so much of your story will really help listeners in both their roles as a practitioner and client. I know that for sure.

Whitney Lowe:

And we like to thank Books of Discovery for sponsoring The Thinking Practitioner Podcast. And Books of Discovery has been a part of the massage therapy education for over 20 years. Thousands of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, eTextbooks and digital resources, books of Discovery likes to say learning adventures start here. And they see that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast and are proud to support our work, knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and bodywork community livening content that advances our profession. Be sure to check out their collection of eTextbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy, and physiology at booksofdiscovery.com, where thinking practitioner listeners can save 15% by entering Thinking at checkout. And thanks to our listeners and sponsors, you can stop by our sites for show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find that over on Til’s site at advanced-trainings.com, and also online at academyofclinicalmassage.com.

If you have a story to share with us or a question you’d like us to address, just record a shortened voice memo on your phone and email it to us, and we’ll try to work it in. Our email is [email protected], and we’d love to hear from you there. Or you can look for us on social media. You can find that under our names, Til Luchau and mine, Whitney Lowe. You can rate us on Apple Podcasts, as it does help other people find the show. And you can hear us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcast, or wherever else you happen to listen. So please do share the word and tell a friend, and thanks again for listening.

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