She lies on her stomach as the large canopy comes down and closes her in like a cocoon. Only her head is visible. The rest of her body is swallowed up as if in a Houdini magic trick.
Fully clothed, 36 pulsating water jets move over the length of her body, which is protected by a waterproof sheet. She hears each wave lapping at her like a tsunami. The pounding water swishes from one end of the clear blue canopy to the other; she feels the force of the water, first on her legs, then her back, and finally on her neck. The wave of the water crests and rolls back with equal force to the tips of her toes.
A timer on the hand-held computerized control which she uses to vary the pressure and speed of the water, clicks off the minutes. She's been in this "chamber of calm" for 15 minutes. Soon, the water jets will stop and the canopy will raise, and she will go back to work.
Wave Therapy is the latest wave to hit Northern California. This system employs the use of a therapeutic and stress-relieving Aqua Massage machine that provides "computerized dry water massage," for the harried, hurried and the just plain hurting.
Choi Tse, owner of the Wave Therapy Stress Reduction Center, located in San Francisco's Financial District, says that wave therapy is an alternative to more conventional massage therapies which require the client to undress and shower afterward due to the use of massage oil. "You come in and you don't have to do anything other than relax, and you can get the same workout as you would with a full massage in about 15 to 20 minutes," she says.
Since opening the center in November 1994, Tse says her clientele is not made up of the busy executive/lunchtime crowd she expected. Instead, clients range from secretaries and curiosity seekers to people who simply have the time. More women than men come in on their lunch breaks, and requests for weekends and evenings are on the rise.
Wave Therapy is not used just for a quick massage. The pulsating water jets provide relief to people with sore or chronic muscle pain. When Mark Shoenberg, a wave therapy regular, first heard about the new massage center, he thought it might be the answer to his back problems. He has tried everything from acupuncture to chiropractic and physical therapy. "It's brought relief to my aching back," Shoenberg says. Shoenberg likes the use of the hand-held computerized control which allows him to apply pressure where it hurts.
The concept of dry water massage began in the 1990s when several inventor prototypes were improved upon, then bought out and marketed for therapeutic purposes. "It's a machine for the '90s," says Aqua Massage's president and owner David Cote. Cote compares the massage you get in one of his machines to two nine-fingered hands massaging you from the center to the side of your body. Explaining how the acupressure water jets work, Cote says, "You can't really compare it to a manual massage at the high frequency because it's gone way beyond what humanly could be done at those frequencies."
Cote manufactures the machine through his company, Aqua Massage International, Inc. He is successful in selling Aqua Massage machines worldwide to health spas, clubs, sports therapy clinics and the occasional sheik in the Middle East. Tse's Wave Therapy Center is currently one of the only users of his machines in Northern California.
While wave therapy is a quick, painless and hygienic way to get a massage, don't look for it to replace other forms of conventional massage. Raquel Vega-Tiernan, a massage therapist at Holistic Health Services in San Francisco, says that she is not attracted to machines as a way of releasing what's going on in her body. "The physical contact of another person can help you release what's going on in your body," she says. "The body remembers everything." Holistic Health Services offers services from Swedish and vibration massage to foot reflexology.
When a tourist from Europe with a lot of free time entered the Wave Therapy Stress Reduction Center, little did he know that he would fall asleep under the canopy. He awoke five hours later, more relaxed than he's ever been. "I guess he didn't have anything better to do because he came back three more times," says Tse. "It was never that long again. After that, it was like two hours."
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