Thai Acupressure

“When any person is sick at Siam, he begins with causing his whole body to be molded by one that is skillful herein, who gets upon the body of the sick person, and tramples him under his feet. It’s likewise reported that great belly’d women do thus cause themselves to be trodden under foot by a child, to procure themselves to be delivered with less pain”.

Simon de La Loubère
Envoy Extraordinary from the French King to the King of Siam in the years 1687 and 1688

Medical massage is practiced in Thailand since the Sukhotai era (1240 to 1320). Throughout Thai history, the ruling Royal caste made an effort to collect, record, and store medical knowledge, and a mainstream body of knowledge was created.

Medical knowledge had originally passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, but since the Sukhotai era, it was preserved also in stone inscriptions, on palm leaves, and by other means.  

In 1836 over 1,000 formulas and the knowledge and theory of traditional medicine regarding the origin of diseases and their treatments were gathered and inscribed on marble tablets and placed on the walls of Wat Po and Wat Raja Oros. The marble tablet inscriptions also included the principle of Thai traditional massage with explanations of the symptoms or diseases each massage spot could heal.  

In the carvings are 60 diagrams of the body. Twenty of them explain the energy lines and the four elements of earth, water, wind and fire; the other 40 describe the effect of the therapy points. Many of these points are used for the treatment of orthopedic disorders, but many others are aimed at treating internal disorders. Treatment of internal disorders with the use of these points is an advanced practice involving a deep knowledge in the theory of Thai traditional medicine.

During the history, generations of practitioners composed combinations of massage spots to treat many diffferent orthopedic ailments.

The point combinations of Wat Po   In the courses, in the book and in the video guide, I teach 60 point combinations. They comprise (together with the routines of the Royal type medical massage) the standard basic collection of Thai medical acupressure routines. They were composed and collected in 1955 during a series of seminars by a group of teachers gathered by the founder of the Wat Po massage school, Mr. Preeda Tangtrongchitr.

In these seminars, knowledge was shared and exchanged in order to compose a standard general massage treatment routine and a standard body of well-tried and proven-effective ancient point combinations for the treatment of simple orthopedic disorders. These two bodies of knowledge have been taught since then in the course for basic general massage and in the course for therapeutic massage in the school of Wat Po in Bangkok.