Shear pleasure

It’s easy for massage therapist Roy Dean to lose track of time.

“My half-hour massages go for about 45 minutes,” Dean said. “An hour usually takes an hour and 15 minutes.”

Dean has worked at Shear M-Pulse for the past six years, and loves every second of it.

“I’ve had bosses that are horrible to work for,” he said. “I love that I get to make people feel good every day, and you never have to deal with jerks because everyone leaves feeling relaxed.”

Dean, 40, has been a massage therapist for 13 years, and said his career transition was smooth.

“I used to do factory work at Rival in Clinton,” he said. “I was always rubbing shoulders and everyone said I was good with my hands, and that I should do it professionally.”

Dean specializes in Swedish massage, but is interested in improving people’s overall health.

“We do this thing called an ionizing foot bath,” he said. “It’s a way to get rid of the toxins in your body.”

Very small positive and negative charges are released into the water, Dean explained.

“This sends positively and negatively charged ions (that) go through your body and act like little magnets attracting toxins.”

The ions, he said, pull the toxins out through the feet.

“The hot water opens up the pores and helps everything move out,” Dean said. “This is really easy on the body. It’s more like taking a bath for the inside of your body,” he said.

Depending on the kinds of toxins inside someone’s body, the water used to soak the feet will turn different colors, like black, red, brown and white with bubbles.

Danielle Dickinson’s water turned black.

Dean said it could be toxins coming from the liver.

“That’s nasty,” Dickinson, 20, said. “It’s gross to know what comes out of you. But I’d do it again.”

Dean has done the foot bath once and plans to make it habit.

“In today’s society we eat so much crap — foods that are low in nutrition and high in toxins,” he said. “We wonder why there’s a health epidemic.”

When Dean took his foot bath, he said he found a lot of heavy metals.

Dickinson, who lives in Houstonia, asked Dean if taking the ionizing foot bath on a regular basis would help with her headaches.

“It might,” he said.

“If she (Dickinson) were to do this every other day for a couple of weeks, she would start to notice a difference,” Dean said. “She’s going to feel more energy, and just feel better in general.”

Despite being so different from what Dean was trained to do, the ionizing foot bath is in the massage therapy family, he said.

“I consider this to be all part of the massage field,” Dean said. “Massage itself is a detoxifying process. We move lymph around and help people de-stress.”