The new spa treatments at the Mayo Clinic offer alternative treatments, opening the door for the spa therapy to be blended into established medical practice. There is a growing body of evidence to support the medical benefits of massage, meditation, guided imagery, acupuncture, yoga. As director of the Mayo Clinic Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program, founded in 2001, Dr. Brent Bauer, M.D. (above), spearheaded much of the research that led doctors at Mayo to routinely recommend these “alternative” treatments to tens of thousands of hospital patients every year.
“We’re seeing a shift,” says Dr. Bauer. “Twenty years ago, a lot of doctors were hostile to spa and integrative medicine. Now, folks in medical school are doing yoga and taking gingko. For them it’s not weird, it’s just what works.”
Taking that to what us spa folks would consider a logical next step, the Mayo Clinic recently opened Rejuvenate at the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program, a lovely full-service spa on the Minnesota campus. The Clinic’s Healthy Living Program already focuses on nutrition, exercise and stress reduction. Opening a spa to serve everyone—a husband who comes to the clinic for tests or worried family members who need help managing their stress—makes a lot of good sense.
No stranger to the spa world, Dr. Bauer has served on the Board of the International Spa Association (ISPA) for almost a decade. “Right off the bat, I could see where spa had moved from pampering to wellness,” he says. “I’ve become very convinced that there’s a great opportunity for spa and medicine to collaborate,” he continues. “Studies support the benefits of massage,” he says. “But do we really want to do massage in the medical wing?”
“We know we feel better when we get a massage,” says Dr. Bauer. “By helping someone feel better, from a spa or beauty treatment, it helps jumpstart someone’s wellness.”
healthyliving.mayoclinic.org
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