Thai Massage and "Thai Massage"

 When we say "Thai massage" today, most people imagine the above image. However, Thai massage isn't represented by this image but rather by the one below. What's the difference? The difference lies in the fact that the scene in the first image is simply put – a commercial brand. Thai massage, on the other hand, is depicted in the second image and represents an ancient folk healing art.

Ajahn Nafon Tosawat (อาจารย์น้ำฝน โตสวัสดิ์), Wiset Chai Chan District, Ang Thong Province, Thailand 

Thai massage has existed for centuries and would typically be practiced by a local healer, often a member of the village. They would essentially grow into healers within their local environment, learning the skill over many years, usually from a family member, knowing personally most of their patients and their medical history, familiar with local customs and beliefs, as well as surrounding nature - the local climate, food, flora and fauna. They were, we might say, inseparable from their immediate surroundings, which is a characteristic of all traditional medicines worldwide. They would care for the health of the community, and in return, the community would provide for all their basic needs.

What we see in the first image, advertised as "Thai massage," is a serious, now already global, capitalist business. This "Thai massage" has emerged through the mutilation, simplification, and standardization of authentic Thai massage, all aimed at creating a brand that enables enormous profit.

Firstly, the owner investing capital and opening a Thai massage salon is often some businessman who has no personal connection to massage but see it as an attractive business opportunity. To capitalize on the allure of authenticity, labor is imported from Thailand. Thai natives practicing this "Thai massage" don't spend years learning it in Thailand; instead, they undergo quick standardized courses of a few hundred hours, learning fixed sequences of manual techniques.  Therefore, they approach each client with the predictable pattern.  As they lack knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and diagnostics of Thai medicine, they apply Thai massage techniques solely for relaxation and not as a physical therapy - what Thai massage really is.

Secondly, practitioners not only leave their local communities, often heading to big cities or remote tourist centers. In the last two decades, they have massively migrated to other continents as well, facing unfamiliar languages, customs, cultures, food and climates. In these conditions, thousands of kilometers away from their families, their culture and their homeland, they work 12-hour shifts, like on an assembly line, for usually meager wages .

From personal experience, I know that  in the last twenty years, Europe could witness litteral mushrooming of these salons offering "Thai massage". In my city alone, there are at least ten of them now. Recently, I was even in a very small, remote Swiss village, and you guessed it—there's a Thai massage salon there too.