The Massachusetts legislative process runs on a 2-year cycle; every two years you must re-submit your bill into a mountainous pile of thousands. You must collect testimony from supporters when your bill is called up for debate, and mount a testimony of defense against bills you oppose. This cycle repeats every 2 years because only a tiny fraction — just hundreds — of the thousands of bills submitted are acted upon. The rest get “sent to study,” meaning you must re-submit your bill during the next 2-year legislative cycle and start all over again.
At this time, two bills are before the Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure which, if enacted, would seriously restrict your access to the wide variety of holistic healing practitioners available in Massachusetts today. This would cause costs to increase for practitioners to run their businesses, and for clients to access their services. Your healthcare costs will rise.
We need your voices to get to legislators through a simple email letter (sample below), letting them know why these two bills are not a good idea and should not be enacted: S.261, An Act Regulating Alternative Healing Therapies and H422, An Act Relative To Creating a Voluntary Licensure Pathway for Traditional Asian Bodywork Therapy Practices.
These bills involve the licensing of practitioners who currently provide their healing services and knowledge to you without licenses from the state granting them “permission” to heal, such as Reiki, herbalism, yoga, shiatsu, breathwork, meditation and hundreds more. Humans have used these powerful, safe and effective innate healing skills for millennia to heal themselves and each other.
The push to license the sharing of these highly beneficial skills can only lead to less healing practitioners available in the state, with fewer modalities to choose from, since licensing restricts who can practice. Annual fees and re-education requirements necessary to obtain licensing will drive many practitioners out of business.
Unlicensed alternative healthcare practitioners are among the safest of professions, as evidenced by the very low yearly malpractice insurance premiums assigned to the profession. If these practitioners had serious issues of causing harm to patients, their yearly fees would be in the thousands, like mainstream practitioners, and not the low hundreds.
Please email your separate testimony letter to oppose H422 and S261 here: JointCommittee.ConsumerProtection&ProfessionalLicensure@malegislature.gov
Use this for your subject line on each email:
Testimony in Opposition to S.261, An Act Regulating Alternative Healing Therapies by YOUR NAME HERE
OR
Testimony in Opposition to H422, An Act Relative to creating a voluntary licensure pathway for traditional Asian bodywork therapy practices by YOUR NAME HERE
Please stay tuned for information about submitting testimony in support of Bill H2504/S.1481, An Act Providing For Consumer Access To And The Right To Practice Complementary And Alternative Health Care Services. This pending safe harbor bill proposal would protect holistic practitioners who abide by defined practices as well as safeguard consumers.
Sample Letter You Can Use for Your Written Testimony
Sample Email:
(Month) (Day) (Year)
The Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure
The State House
24 Beacon Street, Room 42
Boston, MA 02133
RE: Testimony in Opposition to S.261, An Act Regulating Alternative Healing Therapies
Dear Chairs, Senator Payano and Representative Chan, Vice Chairs Senator Driscoll and Representative Keefe, and Members of the Committee:
My name is (your first and last name) (or I am writing on behalf of a business or organization) and I am a (type of practitioner, teacher, or consumer) who resides in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (Do not add where you reside if you do not live or work in MA. Please note, that anyone in the US can join in writing a letter of opposition)
State why you oppose the bill or other issue here. Include a personal story. Tell the Committee why the issue is important to you and how it will affect you, your family, and your community (and/or organization or business).
Also, choose up to three of the strongest points that support your position from the Talking Points for Testimonies below and state them clearly.
Example: I want to voice my strong opposition to S.261 as it affects over 100 holistic modalities (or 150 different styles of Reiki practice) that will not be fairly represented with the proposed Board of Massage and Alternative Healing Therapies. There is no risk of harm to the public from these modalities. The restriction that you can only be licensed if you receive training at a program licensed by the state will put many holistic health care practitioners and teachers out of business and on unemployment because of the burdensome fees. They will limit healthcare choices for consumers, raise prices of sessions, and close hospital and hospice volunteer programs.
Please vote no on S.261. I would greatly appreciate a response. Thank you for your time and consideration of this issue.
Sincerely,
Print your name
Street address
Town/City
Potential Talking Points for Testimonies
The following detailed information on this topic was originally compiled by the inimitable Rita Glassman, co-founder of Reiki Unified, and posted on Healing Boston, Advanced Spiritual Healing & Training with the Modern Mystery School. Thank you to Rita Glassman and Jordan Bain.
Just pick a few of these talking point that resonate for your testimony letter, or write your own!
This is the seventh time alternative health licensing bills have been filed in MA. S.261 is the exact same bill as S.191 and H.282 filed in 2025, and S.221 and H.350 filed in 2021.
In 2021, the MA Attorney General’s Office filed it with Senator Montigny and they said the purpose of the bill was to create a regulatory structure for alternative healing therapies to prevent criminals from using these currently unregulated practices as fronts for human trafficking, but there are no known examples of the field of proposed regulation demonstrating a risk for human trafficking. The MA Attorney General’s Office is no longer sponsoring this bill, and that should tell you something about its irrelevance in combating human trafficking.
The Massachusetts Interagency Human Trafficking Policy Task Force convened by Maura Healey in 2013 did not recommend occupational licensing as a means to combat human trafficking. Neither did The Uniform Act on Prevention of and Remedies for Human Trafficking drafted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in 2013. Nor does the United States Department of State. Furthermore, no one seems to have filed bills trying to implement the recommendations of the taskforce so that we can actually put an end to human trafficking.
S.261 seeks to regulate holistic healthcare occupations, including Reiki, with no evidence that these professions by themselves present any health or safety risk to the public. The cost of insurance for these fields is minimal. Insurance companies employ Actuaries, the best risk assessors in the world, and if annual premiums for Alternative Healing Therapists are less than $300 annually, it should demonstrate that there is a near zero risk of legal claims against this industry.
S.261 is not able to name all of the modalities that it would cover. The purpose of licensing a field is to protect consumers from harm. There is zero evidence that the named modalities pose a human trafficking risk or any other kind of risk of harm. For the hundreds of unnamed and vaguely referenced fields of practice, if you cannot name a professional field, jumping to regulate it and dictate what the training should be makes no sense.
S.261 seeks to impose government regulation on a wide variety of practices, many of which are spiritual, religious, and cultural in nature. In doing so, there is a high risk of discrimination, racism, and unequal enforcement.
To the best of our knowledge, this bill was not designed based on convening relevant stakeholders and healing professionals and doesn’t even have the legislative or government co-sponsors it has had in the past. Seriously, please, actually ask us what would be good.
The proposed board structure has 7 positions and 3 of them would be given to licensed massage therapists, 2 to alternative healing therapists, 1 to a police officer, and 1 to a consumer. One, massage therapists have no place on this board whatsoever because they are not in the relevant field of practice. Two, there is no way that 2 alternative healing therapists can represent somewhere between 100-200 different fields of alternative healing practice, some related some entirely not related. For example, there are 150+ types of just Reiki. These problems are not solved by the advisory council proposal – this council would need to have 100s of members discussing and agreeing on regulations and standards. Feldenkrais practitioners often have a multi-year training and over a thousand hours, while Reiki trainings can be a weekend. Completely different, both valid.
The majority of the practitioners are sole practitioners who hold instructional programs in their living rooms. This bill will put thousands of practitioners and teaching professionals out of business. A substantial majority of these are women who do this work part time for gross receipts of a maximum of $20,000-30,000 per year, and in many cases far less.
To have a teaching program approved by the state will be cost prohibitive, in excess of $8,000 ($5,000 bond, $2,500 application fee, and $1000 application fee for each instructor), which will force many programs to close and will limit the number of Reiki volunteers available to hospitals and hospices.
S.261 would greatly reduce citizen options as almost 50% of Americans utilize alternative medicine and it would increase the cost to consumers.
According to the Polaris Report, “The average illicit massage business connects to at least one other illicit massage business as well as non-massage venues such as nail salons, beauty shops, restaurants, grocery stores, and dry cleaners. Overwhelmingly, these connected businesses are used to launder money earned from the illicit massage business.” Licensing sole proprietors will not stop organized crime
The most effective legislative tool for addressing trafficking operations is to focus on relevant business owners and operators, not unrelated individual practitioners.
The last three presidential administrations, Obama, Trump and Biden, issued white papers or executive orders for state policymakers to enact reforms reducing the prevalence of unnecessary and overly broad occupational licensing that hurts workers and consumers.
No data exists that licensing has ever meaningfully reduced sex trade.
Legislators have confused the facts: there was prostitution, not human trafficking in the incidents regarding Robert Kraft in Florida and the GA incident.
There has not been a conviction of a Reiki practitioner for human trafficking in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for more than 20 years if ever.
There is no way to effectively regulate all of the different fields of practice under one board (even if that were needed or desirable). The bill’s author likely does not understand that many of the practices here are now taught and offered online – so anyone in MA can access them through practitioners who work, pay taxes, and contribute to the economy in other states. Furthermore, many of these practices are regularly incorporated into other unregulated, and often virtual fields such as business coaching, leadership coaching, and life coaching. Coaches can be working with strategy at one moment, run into a block the client has, and switch to things like energy healing, breathwork, somatic healing, etc.
Research indicates 49% of Americans utilize complementary and alternative health care options.
Consumers spend more than $30 billion annually on out-of-pocket purchases of complementary and alternative products and services.
Major teaching hospitals including Beth Israel Deaconess, Brigham and Women’s, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins and Cleveland Clinic utilize complementary health care professionals.
The complementary and alternative health care industry supports thousands of families while providing safe, valuable options for Massachusetts residents.
I am categorically against this so called “Bodywork Bill” — because it is counter to free will, counter to all the principles and constitution of this Commonwealth, and counter to the founding principles of the United States of America.
This bill is NOT designed to protect the public from harm; it is, and always has been designed to SHUT DOWN an entire industry with thousands of practitioners. Functionally nobody – I truly mean NOBODY – would be able to meet the requirements of the bill, or the structure of the board or the advisory committee.
The Yoga schools & Yoga studios hired a lobbyist in the past (because they have the money to do that) to keep Yoga out of this bill. The Yoga community analyzed this bill and knows that if applied to Yoga, this bill would shut them down too, despite Yoga Schools and Studios having way more money and organization as a recognizable community.
Pilates studios and every Fitness club or gym in the state could easily be classified into this, as they all teach breathwork, body awareness, and coach people on mental and internal states.
The practitioners offering the vast array of modalities being targeted in the bodywork bill are often doing so part time. They do not earn the kind of money to have the bandwidth to participate in an advisory board. Most practitioners would be marginalized by the administrative structure itself, and then completely shut out due to the costs. To organize a training costs over $8,000 ($5,000 bond, $2,500 application fee, and $1,000 application fee per instructor). If I want to be certified and licensed, and I am the only person in MA doing what I do, I would have to open my own school, wait for approvals, which could take months or years, pay $8,500 or more, and then spend 500 hours in my own training to train myself to be able to practice what I already have tens of thousands of hours of training and practice in.
The realities that would unfold from this bodywork bill are 100% out of touch with the reality on the ground. It is obvious nobody behind this bill has ever genuinely asked the stakeholders involved what they would like – the very foundation of good governance.
The bodywork bill seeks to exert onerous administrative pressure to accomplish its unspoken goal: to permanently shut down the entire industry of alternative and spiritual practices in Massachusetts under an unrelated premise of human trafficking. Human trafficking is a bogeyman danger in this industry with zero basis in fact (zero convictions ever in the entire state of a holistic healer human trafficking themselves, because it’s impossible to traffick yourself).
Talking with various energy healing practitioners, it is estimated that the vast majority of practitioners are part time, and earn in the low five figures – perhaps $10,000-$30,000 per year estimated gross receipts before taxes. This bill is designed to put thousands of mostly women practitioners out of business under the insulting premise that those female sole proprietors are human trafficking themselves, and need a board of massage therapists, unrelated practitioners who know nothing about what they do, and police officers to regulate them.
In addition to the $8,500 or more plus yearly licensing fees, this bill would functionally require mandatory LLC or S Corp status to conform to the regulations to hire themselves as a licensed employee. The yearly costs and administrative headache of the required tax filings for having an LLC / S Corp, and hiring yourself as your sole employee, would ALONE stop many sole proprietors from operating.
For the tiny handful who could make it through licensing, and the thousands of dollars per year in costs to have an LLC/S Corp and hire themselves as an employee, plus yearly licensing fees and the time involved in those structures, every single class they teach would have to be inspected all over again by the board to be approved AFTER the individual is already being licensed, with unspecified waiting times that could stretch into weeks, months, years, and be denied without stated cause. The board and advisory committee are not governed by any laws, and would become ripe breeding grounds for corruption, nepotism, favoritism, and discrimination, creating unaccountable government overreach into the lives of private citizens and their unique spiritual practices.
For those who claim that mainstream religion and alternative spiritual practices are different because mainstream religion is not a business, and therefore alternative spiritual practices should not enjoy the protections of mainstream religion, please open your eyes. Mainstream religion is absolutely a business – the Catholic church is still one of the wealthiest organizations on the planet despite decades of REAL sex scandals and loss of trust. They just have a different revenue model, as any business school student could tell you.
I have never heard something so blatantly designed to SHUT DOWN an entire industry of thousands of holistic and spiritual practitioners, drive them to bankruptcy, and force them to leave the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so they can use their spiritual gifts to serve elsewhere, if they could even afford to move. Most could not afford to move out of state, they are tied to their spouses, children, and other jobs. The bodywork bill would criminalize thousands of the most heart-centered, loving, and kind individuals helping others in our Commonwealth.
According to national research, over 50% of Americans have used some form of Holistic, Alternative therapy, care, or spiritual modalities. 50% of Americans are on Food Stamps. Basically, if you can afford holistic and alternative practices in your life, you probably use them.
41+% of Massachusetts residents actively used some form of complementary and alternative holistic or spiritual practice in the past year. Let that sink in – that means approximately 3 million (!!!) Massachusetts residents are receiving these services from thousands or tens of thousands of practitioners. There are no lawsuits, no arrests, no human trafficking. If the bodywork bill passes, 3 million Massachusetts residents could lose access to care they depend on and value, while thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of families in Massachusetts would lose the income they are sustaining themselves with.
NOBODY can even agree on definitions of what these modalities are. Nobody on this committee, and nobody in this room, can even define reiki. Or executive coaching with an intuitive coach. Or energy healing. Or what exactly “spiritual energy” is. Or what breathwork is. Are you doing breathwork right now? What about when you go for a run? Are people doing breathwork when they go for a run? Or is it only officially recognized “breathwork” if they are registered for the Boston Marathon? Are track coaches who coach their students on how to breathe while running going to become classified as practitioners?
The overreach of the entire concept that you can regulate this incredibly diverse field is truly preposterous. The people of Massachusetts are weary of fighting against this kind of ongoing insult to common sense, and is part of the overall trend of loss in faith in our institutions in this country that bills like this are allowed to come up and be reintroduced again and again.
Carol Bedrosian is the founder and publisher of Spirit of Change since 1987. She can be reached at carol@spiritofchange.org.
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