Yes, we can’t believe it either, but Body Charge sent 5 therapists to Santa Monica on Saturday night (june 16) for the

Stanley Cup Party.

And I’m not blowing our horn, but it’s good to let people know some of the places we have worked.  Trisha you can see, is an LA Kings fan, and she is in hog heaven……the therapists massaged the Kings and their guests, and then sat down to a dinner catered by Wolfgang Puck.   As owner of this company, I should have brought my massage chair.  O well….

Just the latest news in a day in a life of a chair massage company.

 Body Charge is headquartered in Los Angeles and has a satellite location in New York City.  Our main areas of service are Los Angeles and New York where therapists are screened, interviewed and are required to give a hands on demo of their skills.  A thorough reference check is given as well, because we hire the best available in the city.

Body Charge’s main offices are Los Angeles and New York.  Paul Guditis, Body Charge owner: ” Spreading ourselves too thinly over the US sometimes gets us in trouble.  In staffing small markets, there really is no chance of interviewing all of the therapists.  It is just totally unrealistic.  That is why our main focus will be the major markets in New York and Los Angeles.”

“I have a chance to go out and personally interview therapists, get a hands on demo, and find the best therapists available who want to do this work.  It’s amazing what people put down on paper, and what their massages are like.  Sometimes they are two different worlds.

” We can be called for anything, anywhere, anytime.  My job is to make sure it happens, with the best therapists available for the work.  I consider us one of the best out there.  And through the years, I’ve had a chance to see what is out there.  Seeing an employee get out of a massage chair with a smile and a healthy glow, well, there’s not a whole lot more that can make me happier.”

Body Charge can provide reflexology and foot massage at your health fairs, trade shows and employee appreciation days. It is a great addition to the standard chair massages we offer.  Your guests and employees have a chance to get off their feet and be pampered with a great foot treatment by an experienced reflexologist and accupressurist who addresses specific health issues through the feet and accupressure points.

It’s another way of showing your employees that you care!

Massage not only feels good, but it also good for you.  Here are a few benefits:

1.  Massage reduces stress. Why?  Massage creates chemical changes within the body that reduce pain and stress.  One of the culprits is substance P.  Substance P is a neuro-peptide that transmits signals of pain and anxiety to the brain.  Studies show that massage twice a week showed a reduction of substance P in the patients saliva, and reduced pain.

2.  Massage strengthens your immunity.   Under stress your body produces cortisol, which in turn kills off important cells for your immune system.  Massage circulates white blood cells through out the body, and reduces the cortisol production.

3. Massage lowers blood pressure.

4.  Techniques:  There is no evidence supporting one massage technique over another.  As long as the pressure is enough to make a temporary indentation, it’s doing the job.

5.  Self massage.  Targeting the tendons in the forearm by stretching them can relieve pain and discomfort from long hours on the computer.  Also stretching those tendons by doing active stretches will also help with those computer muscles…..

People who worked overtime tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress.

By Sarah Klein, Health.com

May 11, 2010 2:39 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Study: Doctors should see long working hours as a potential risk factor for heart disease
• People who worked overtime were healthier in other ways
• They were also more likely to exhibit “Type A” personality traits
• All of the study participants were white-collar workers in England

(Health.com) — If you’ve been saying for years that long hours at work are killing you, forward this article to your boss–it might literally be true. According to a new study, people who work more than 10 hours a day are about 60 percent more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than people who clock just seven hours a day.

It’s not clear why this is, but the researchers suggest that all that time on the job means less free time to unwind and take care of yourself. Stress may also play a role–but not as much as you might think. Working long hours appears to hurt your heart even if you don’t feel particularly stressed out, the study found.

“Balance between work and leisure time is important,” says the lead author of the study, Dr. Marianna Virtanen, M.D., an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and University College London. “If you work long hours, the fact is that you may be exposed to higher stress levels and you do not have enough time to take care of your health.”

Doctors “should include long working hours on their list of potential risk factors” for heart disease, she adds.

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Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues followed more than 6,000 British civil servants with no history of heart disease for an average of 11 years. The participants were all drawn from a larger, ongoing study known as Whitehall II that began in 1985.

During the study, a total of 369 people had heart attacks (some of them fatal) or were diagnosed with heart disease after seeking medical attention for chest pain.

Compared to people who worked seven hours a day, those who worked 10 to 12 hours a day had a 56 percent increased risk of heart disease, heart attack, or death. Those who worked for 8 to 10 hours a day were not at increased risk.

The findings are “sort of a wakeup call,” says Dr. Gordon McInnes, M.D., a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Glasgow, in the U.K., who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. Doctors should be extra vigilant about the heart health of patients who work long hours, he says.

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The study doesn’t say how, exactly, long hours at work might affect heart health. To try to pinpoint the effect of work time, Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues took a range of health factors into account in their analysis, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diet and exercise, and whether or not the participants smoked. They also factored in the workers’ rank and salary, since socioeconomic status has been linked to heart health.

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In some ways, the people who worked overtime were healthier than those who worked just seven hours a day. They were less likely to drink heavily and smoke, for instance, and they got more exercise. On the other hand, they tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress, having more demanding jobs, and having less control over their work.

They were also more likely to exhibit “Type A” personality traits. Type A behavior includes aggressiveness, irritability, and a “chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time,” according to the study.

But the workers who burned the candle at both ends were still at greater risk of heart disease even when all of these factors were accounted for, which suggests that something besides stress, personality, and behaviors such as smoking may be responsible.

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Still, workplace stress may have affected the study’s findings in spite of the researchers’ attempts to control for it, says Dr. McInnes. “I personally think stress was involved,” he says. “These people did a lot of extra work, which I would think is stressful. But it’s very difficult to be sure.”

Peter Kaufmann, Ph.D., a researcher at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Washington, D.C., says that this type of study (known as an observational study) can’t prove whether long hours directly increase heart risk. For instance, Kauffman says, it’s possible that the workers’ overall lifestyle–including type A behavior–contributed to the long hours and the heart risk observed in the study.

“You would expect people who are more driven and more impatient to work longer hours to get things done,” Kaufmann says. “But they may be equally driven and impatient with the people around them, family and friends. They may have disorganized work habits and lives. Or [the long hours] may reflect failed social relationships or that they use work as a means to escape.”

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The study had other limitations. The researchers only measured blood pressure and hours worked at the start of the study, and were therefore not able to track how these factors may have interacted over time, McInnes says. Blood pressure can be affected by stress and can in turn cause heart problems.

In addition, as the study notes, the researchers did not know whether the workers had been diagnosed with anxiety or depression, both of which have been linked to heart disease.

Lastly, all of the study participants were white-collar workers in England, which means the findings may not apply to all workers everywhere.

Copyright Health Magazine 2010

Women whose jobs require them to work “very hard” or “very fast” are 88 percent more likely to have a heart attack.

(Health.com) — Women with very demanding jobs are nearly twice as likely to have a heart attack as their peers in more easygoing occupations, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School analyzed 10 years of survey and medical data on more than 17,000 women in the health profession. The women, who were enrolled in a long-running study on heart disease, were all in their 50s or early 60s when the study began.

The women who said their job requires them to work “very hard” or “very fast” but who have little say over their day-to-day tasks — a combination known as “job strain” — were 88 percent more likely than those in less-stressful jobs to have a heart attack.

They were also 43 percent more likely to need heart surgery, according to the study, which was presented Sunday at an annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Chicago.

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In addition, women who were stressed out by work — or worried about losing their jobs — were more likely than those with steady employment to be physically inactive and to have high cholesterol. (Job insecurity by itself did not appear to increase the risk of heart attack, however.)

“This new data is among the most important to emerge in recent years concerning the relationship between job strain and cardiovascular health,” says Peter Kaufmann, Ph.D., a researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute who has studied mental health and heart disease but was not involved in the new research.

Doctors and other experts in the field need to do more to help people manage work-related stress, Kaufmann adds. The findings “emphasize that progress is needed urgently in this arena,” he says.

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The increased risk of heart attack seen in the study can’t be attributed solely to health or socioeconomic factors. To zero in on job strain, the researchers controlled for age, race, education, and income, as well as blood pressure, body weight, and cholesterol.

And even though all of the women in the study were health professionals, it was a “very socioeconomically diverse” group that included doctors, nurses, dietitians, and researchers, says the lead author of the study, Dr. Michelle Albert, M.D., a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston.

Much of the research to date on job stress and heart health has been done in men. But women are more likely than men to experience job strain, not to mention stress related to home and family demands, says Paul Landsbergis, Ph.D., an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn.

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“The results certainly imply that we need to do more to make jobs healthier,” Landsbergis says. One way to accomplish this, he adds, might be to give individual workers more control over their jobs through collective bargaining and other types of organizing.

For her part, Albert recommends some simple steps to help women limit the impact of work-related stress: Exercise regularly, try to leave your work at the workplace, and take 10 to 15 minutes a day to relax and concentrate on your physical, mental, and emotional health. It’s also important to have a network of family and friends to help you cope, she says.

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“We’re never going to be able to get rid of stress — some stress is positive, actually,” Albert says. “The negative aspects of stress we’re going to need to learn how to manage.”

The AHA’s annual Scientific Sessions meeting highlights the latest heart-related research and treatment advances. Unlike studies published in medical journals, the research presented at the meeting has not been vetted by independent experts in the field.

Copyright Health Magazine 2010