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Frequently Asked Questions
Here are the answers to some of the most common questions we're asked.
Is tipping required?
Gratuity (tip) is expected for all therapists except Catherine, the owner of the clinic. It is customary to tip your massage therapist after each session, as their wages are all based on the expectation of tips.
A tip is NOT included in your gift certificate, voucher, coupon, or special offer. Even if the massage was a gift to you, the gratuity is your responsibility.
It is customary to tip on the regular price of the service, not the discounted price you may have paid based on a special offer or promotion.
For a 60-minute service, average gratuity ranges from $10-20. And for a 90-minute service, average gratuity ranges from $20-40.
Therapists always appreciate cash tips. If you will not be making any additional purchases at the time of your appointment, please plan to bring cash to avoid a credit card fee.
(As the owner of the clinic, Catherine does not expect tips. For any clients who want to leave gratuity, for whom it is important to tip, tips are accepted, and they are always appreciated.)
What time should I arrive for my appointment?
Your appointment begins at the time it is scheduled. Time for paperwork, bathroom stop, parking, etc. are not built into your appointment time. This is particularly important for your first appointment, because you will need to complete your paperwork before the therapist can work on you. Please plan to arrive 10-15 minutes early to complete your paperwork.
Please be aware that if your appointment begins late, it will still end on time, as the therapist will need to move on to the next appointment as scheduled.
On rare occasions, the therapist may be running late from the appointment right before yours. In this instance, the therapist will ensure you receive your full time, so long as your schedule will permit it.
How long will my appointment be?
We do not rush anyone in or out of their appointments, meaning we do not rush you onto the table and then hurry you out the door afterward. Rather, we allow a full ten minutes for a thorough intake interview, during which the therapist will ask you questions about how you're feeling, what you've been up to since you were last seen, and any changes you may have noticed in your body. For a 60-minute appointment, you will have 50-55 minutes on the table. Once the massage is complete, the therapist will take as much as 10 minutes to explain what was found and accomplished during the massage, make suggestions about what you should be doing at home until your next appointment to get the most out of your treatment, get you rescheduled, and answer all your questions.
*Note: If your appointment begins late for reasons other than the therapist running late, table-time will be cut short. If possible, the therapist will cut the interview short to get you as much time on the table as possible, but the interview is important, because it tells the therapist where to work, and therefore cannot always be shortened.
What can I expect during my first appointment?
The first appointment is typically the longest. The therapist will review your medical history with you and complete a thorough initial intake interview. We find it is most effective if we treat you as a whole person with an interconnected body, so we take the time to ask a lot of questions and begin to put together as complete a picture as possible of your medical history, your current complaint, and parts of your lifestyle that play into whatever's going on with you today. During your first appointment, as well as subsequent appointments, we often use assessment techniques that allow the therapist to pinpoint the trouble area and then measure progress.
The therapist will make a recommendation for treatment that day, which will be targeted to your area of pain or complaint. After the focused bodywork, the therapist will lay out a treatment plan specific to you and your treatment goals, which will include a rough timeline as well as the targeted changes you should start making at home, which always includes stretching. Before you leave, the therapist will make sure to have answered all of your questions so you know what we're working on, what we're working toward, what approach we're taking and why, and why the things you should do at home will help you get better.
What can I expect during subsequent appointments?
All appointments will begin with an interview. During this time, the therapist will ask how you've been since your last appointment, what if any changes you've noticed, how your homework is going, and anything else you've noticed or want to share. This interview will allow the therapist to continue to modify the treatment plan in order to hone in the problem with laser-like focus. The therapist will also likely perform assessments. Some of these may be ones performed previously, or they may be new. Then the therapist will make a recommendation as to what to work on during the appointment.
After the bodywork, the therapist will review findings, make any necessary changes to your treatment plan and homework, and answer all your questions.
What do I do if I need to cancel or reschedule my appointment?
Please know we require at minimum of 24 hours' notice of cancellation or reschedule. In order to do either, you can simply reply to the email notification you received regarding the appointment, or email our office at Hello@DelSolCommunityWellness.com. Or you can call our office at (970) 218-7179.
Our part-time scheduler is part time, so you may have to leave a message. If you wish to reschedule, please indicate that and you will receive a call back. You can also log in to our online scheduling system via a link at the bottom of any email you receive regarding your appointment. If you've not created a login, you'll do that the first time. Once logged in, you are able to modify your own appointments online.
*NOTE: Do not reply to the text reminders you receive. Those go off into cellular Neverland and are never seen or heard from again, and they never reach our office.
Should my massage hurt?
In short, no. However, this question is slightly complex, so let's go into a bit more detail. The old adage, "No pain, no gain," does not apply to massage or bodywork. If the pain is so intense you have to hold your breath or grit your teeth, you need to speak up-it's too deep. Pain like that means the kind of tissue damage we usually don't want. You need to tell the therapist it's too deep. (No therapist will EVER be upset at hearing this from a patient, so don't ever worry about hurting anyone's feelings, appearing weak, or anything else!) And you won't be shorting yourself in your treatment either. We will actually make MORE progress if we stay away from this kind of pain.
Tissue damage is real. At its core, massage and bodywork is essentially a therapeutic form of tissue damage. When you exercise, you are actually breaking down the muscle fibers. When they rebuild, they rebuild better and stronger; that's how you build strength. Something very similar is happening when you get a massage. We are intentionally causing controlled, limited, specific tissue damage which then allows the muscles and tissues to rebuild better than they were.
If the work is causing hold-your-breath, grit-your-teeth pain, we are no longer facilitating therapeutic tissue damage. Rather, the work is causing the kind of damage that comes from injury, and it goes without saying injuries take time to heal and set back any goals you might be trying to accomplish. You and the therapist are a team. The therapist will often recognize the pressure is too deep, causing the wrong kind of pain, but not always. You have to help by letting the therapist know something hurts.
There is a kind of pain during massage we typically refer to as a "hurts so good" kind of pain. It's different from the breath-holding, teeth-gritting kind of pain. The hurts-so-good kind of pain is acceptable. It's a kind of pain that does not impede breathing, cause limbs to jerk or tense, or otherwise force you to "just get through it." It's the kind of pain that you want to drink in or fall into, that's just so good you could stay there a while. This kind of pain is okay, and signals we are still in the therapeutic zone.
Everyone's pain tolerance is different, and every therapist works differently. "Deep pressure" to you might not be the same as "deep pressure" to someone else, and that's okay. That's the beauty of massage. The principles are the same, but the techniques can be modified and tailored specifically for you, each time. That means you can get maximum benefit from each treatment.
Is it normal to be sore the next day?
While it isn't normal or desired to be sore the day after a massage, it's not unheard of, either. It's important to differentiate between being sore and feeling like you had some work done on a specific muscle or area. If you feel sore, meaning you have pain, the work was too deep. It caused the wrong kind of damage, and it will likely take you a couple days to recover. It will be important to tell your therapist this happened and to speak up during your next treatment when you experience the wrong kind of pain.
It is absolutely normal to feel as if you've had some work done after getting a massage. This feeling is different from pain or soreness. It's just the feeling that someone was touching that muscle and/or something about that muscle changed. When a muscle is so tight and short it's causing you pain, or causing you to move in such a way you have pain, you will feel a change after work is done to lengthen and loosen that muscle. You will likely feel small shifts or other changes while your body continues to sort of unwind and settle back into a more proper alignment, or as other muscles no longer have to do jobs they aren't meant to do, because the muscles just worked on are now functioning more as they should be. This is an indication your treatment is working, and that you're soon on your way to being pain-free and moving as you should be.
In either instance, drinking more water will help your body repair itself and can reduce both the feelings of pain and soreness as well as the awareness of having had work done. In the 24-48 hours following your massage, you should always drink extra water, meaning an amount of water above and beyond what you typically drink.
What is HIPAA?
HIPAA is a federal law that protects medical information. Any doctor, hospital, or other provider that collects and stores medical information is subject to HIPAA privacy laws, and this does include Del Sol Massage & Bodywork. What this means for you is that all of the information you provide to us is kept completely confidential, including payment, billing, demographic, and scheduling information. Even the fact that you've held an appointment is private.
This is true of all our patients, and all those who interact with us in order to become patients. The scheduler, therapists, and owner cannot talk to you about anyone else, including spouses, adult children, and friends, just like we cannot talk to anyone else about you. Please be understanding of this when you ask about people you've referred to us. We treasure your referrals-and this is not an understatement. In our minds, there is no higher compliment you could give then to trust us enough to send someone to us for treatment. However, in order to follow up on that person and learn whether or not he or she came for an appointment, you need to ask that person directly. It is a HIPAA violation for any DSM&B employee, contractor, or affiliate to even let you know if that person scheduled an appointment, and HIPAA violations are a really big deal. That being true, when you ask us about your referrals, we will always encourage you to follow up with the referral directly. That person can not only confirm she had an appointment, or not, she can tell you how it went, how she feels, and anything else she thought about it, if she's so inclined to share. We could never give you so much information.
Why will my therapist give me homework, and what will it be?
In nearly fifteen years of doing massage and bodywork, Catherine, the owner of Del Sol Community Wellness, has found that patients get better at lightening speed when they do a few basic things at home. Knowing that to be true, she has trained and instructed all her therapists to include homework as part of all treatment plans. Our philosophy is to get people out of pain and moving better fast, so we're always looking for ways to do in three appointments what we've been able to do in four, or to do in six appointments what we've been able to do in eight. We have found the key to be a few specific things patients need to do at home.
Homework always includes at least one stretch, a water goal, and magnesium. It may include any number of other things as well, and all of them are specific to you, your complaint, your goal, and your lifestyle, and everything is re-evaluated and sometimes tweaked every time you come back for another appointment. We give you targeted stretching to capitalize on any gains we made in specific muscles each appointment, and these often change over the course of your treatment. Generalized stretching is wonderful, and we advocate a regular yoga practice. However, we are all about targeted, specific work in order to accomplish targeted, specific results, so we give you targeted, specific stretches.
How long will it take me to get better?
This question is impossible to answer, especially without doing a thorough intake, evaluation, assessment, and palpation assessment. There is no other body just like yours, which means there is no other body with exactly the same pain or problem. However, we can say that generally our patients are pain-free or very nearly pain-free in about four appointments. Our treatment process is usually 4-6 weeks-however there are plenty of outliers, so do not take this estimation to heart!
It's worth noting here that the people who get better that fast are the ones who jump into treatment with both feet. Meaning, they do everything the therapist recommends they do at home, and they do it committedly. They put in the work-for a short period of time, so they get better, and they get back to their lives. When treatment drags on, one of two things is true. One, the patient is not doing their homework-she's not stretching, she's not drinking the recommended amount of water, and she's not using magnesium spray, etc. Or two, the patient has a very physical job, and he just continues to beat on his body day after day, week after week. In the second instance, treatment and maintenance will likely go hand-in-hand and require very regular appointments to keep things under control and jump on pains and aches quickly when they come up.
Because CST targets the central nervous system, switching it from fight-or-flight mode to rest-and-digest mode (which should be our normal default state, but usually isn't), this technique works to decrease and eliminate pain, allows your body to make postural and structural corrections, elevates and regulates mood, helps facilitate learning and cognition, aids sleep, and a lot of other things. For those of you with stubborn, chronic pain that just won't go away, low-level pain that is always just under the surface, or who have hit a plateau in the healing process, CST is a technique to seriously consider. It will give your body the chance to heal in a way no other therapy can, and it will allow us to make greater progress with the other techniques we're using.
Yes! Because this treatment works on the central nervous system and enables the body's ability to heal itself, this technique is indicated in a wide variety of treatments. To name a few, it's effective for pain, stress, anxiety, sleep problems, trauma recovery, headaches/migraines, TMJ, mood and cognitive issues, structural and/or postural issues, numbness or tingling, fainting, fatigue, and whiplash.
During a cranial session, if we're only using cranial techniques, you stay fully dressed. It is a hands-on technique, so you will feel the therapist touching your head, neck, torso, pelvis, legs, and feet. The techniques are very still. Unlike a massage, where the therapist is using gliding, moving strokes, cranial techniques involve holding a particular position for several minutes.
And the touch is very light pressure, so while the technique has a profound impact, the touch is very gentle. Quite often, patients relax so much they fall asleep. Patients often experience sensations of relaxing or unwinding within their bodies. Pains shift and dissipate. Patients experience feelings of peacefulness, contentment, and balance.
