GOING INTO THE HEALTH SECTOR:
In the past 25 years Shiatsu has established itself as an Oriental and natural medicine in the alternative healthcare sector in Europe. The next step and challenge for Shiatsu lies in the confrontation with Western medicine and its institutions.
Tomas Nelissen, founder of the International Academy for Hara Shiatsu in Vienna, Austria (1989) has been working with his students in hospitals since 1993. Till now, more than 50,000 treatments have been given in the fields of gynaecology, geriatrics, rehabilitation, paediatrics and burnout prevention.

Tomas: ‘Since 1993 I have gained a lot of experience in Austrian clinics.
Our practical training in these institutions has enriched not only our students and our school as a whole, but also the people of all the institutions with which we were fortunate enough to work: the doctors, the therapists and the staff. We have managed to significantly improve the condition of 70 percent of our clients. This high success rate proves once again the enormous potential of Hara Shiatsu’.

How it started
At the time, I chose Austria for the founding of the Hara Shiatsu Academy,
I felt that this country was the most open in Europe to an oriental traditional form of therapy such as Shiatsu.
The story of my project to work with Hara Shiatsu in hospitals started very spontaneously when a psychiatrist came to me for treatment. After the second or third treatment we had already got to know each other well, so I asked him what he thought about the idea of giving my students practical experience in his hospital. I was of the opinion that everyone involved would benefit from this. Because he himself had experience with Hara Shiatsu and knew the effect of it, he was very enthusiastic about the idea. He could even immediately imagine which of his patients would be the most suitable for this project.

Opening doors
And so I started in 1993 with the first Hara Shiatsu practical training in the Ybbs therapy centre on the Danube. We treated twenty-four patients once a week in the department for alcohol abuse and mental disorders (under the medical supervision of Prim. Dr. Gerhard Willinger). The patients of the departments concerned were motivated and their medication could be reduced. In a three-month cycle, we found that there was a 10 percent reduction in relapse among these patients.

Due to the success of the first Hara Shiatsu practical training course, the number of these projects had steadily increased and we now worked, in addition to the Psychiatric Hospital, with 5 more projects in 4 different institutions: an old people’s home in Vienna focused on geriatrics, a department in the Viennese Wilheminenspital focused on children and adolescents with psychosomatic disorders, a department in the rehabilitation clinic in the Mistelbach city hospital and the Unfall Meidling Vienna, focused on orthopaedics and rehabilitation. The gynaecology and burn-out projects were housed in the Academy.

In the department of children with anorexia (Dr. Berhard Kluger) we showed that we had a success rate of 40 to 50 percent, after we had primarily treated the parents. After 10 treatments, the feeding tube could be removed from the nose, usually it was girls who now regained their strength and self-confidence and began to show a normal eating behaviour.

For orthopaedic and rehabilitation cases, the patients opted for the hospital we were treating. We had become acquainted with the progress we had made in accelerating the healing of the musculoskeletal system. Often patients who could no longer be helped by physiotherapy were referred to us.
We took pictures – before and after the treatment – where the results after the Shiatsu treatments were very clear. The holistic characteristic of the Shiatsu therapy proves its effect. The symptom is never the problem, it’s always about the human being in its entirety.

Shiatsu has a preventive effect on the regeneration of the musculoskeletal system, e.g.
Shiatsu activates the mobilisation after a bone fracture in a leg or joint, or frozen shoulder via the meridian system to such an extent that the sympathetic and parasympathetic system come into harmony in a short period of time. This has a very positive effect on the metabolism. The whole system then takes on its role, for which it is responsible. The holistic property of Shiatsu therapy proves its effect.

Gynecology is one of my favourite themes because it is about disturbances that can be solved fantastically with Shiatsu, as long as the woman no longer uses a contraceptive pill! The artificial hormones block all normal hormones.
The main themes we work with are the PMS, child wish and the menopause.
In Chinese medicine, PMS means a ‘stagnation of the liver and blood’, and after ten treatments you are well on the way to a detoxification of the blood.
The possibility of becoming pregnant normally is therefore approaching.
Professor J. Huber, the ‘hormone coryfee’ of Austria, sent us all the
cases that have been treated. It was medically impossible for these women to become pregnant, yet 25% of these women became pregnant in our clinic, sometimes after a year and a half.

Until the age of 15, my 5 children regularly received Shiatsu against growing pains, hip tilt, flat feet, weak knee and ankle ligaments and in the growth phase a lot is still possible.

Results
So far, we have documented more than 100,000 treatments, and many graduation reports have been published. Our graphs have been published in German-speaking and English-speaking journals.

Hara Shiatsu out of the head into the heart
We don’t want to compete with Western medicine. It is about exchanging methods and ethics and collecting valuable experiences. Hara Shiatsu is not a medicine, it is a supplement to the existing therapy offer.

Hara Shiatsu is a holistic approach that observes the universal laws. Healing does not happen through willpower, but out of consideration and making things happen. Therefore, it is important to simply accept what there is, without immediately using the word ‘healthy’. This distinguishes us from doctors and means that we do not practice medicine in the true sense of the word! Although the original approach to medicine was a holistic one, in the past century medicine has become more and more an art of repair. The main focus of today’s medicine is the treatment of symptoms.
The strength of Hara Shiatsu is that it works regeneratively by uniting the spiritual body, the soul body and the physical body. Its positive effect is expressed in vegetative functions such as sleep, metabolism, menstruation, the respiratory system and the autonomic nervous system; the effect is often not immediate. It takes a while for these three bodies to come together in the right way and only then can the resulting process begin, so that the symptoms also disappear.

Fortunately, there are already hospitals in the Netherlands that are trying to allow other forms of therapy because they offer a different access, the holistic access, that put the power of man in the foreground, that is actually the key to true healing.