A massage therapist in New Zealand has been censured after sending a 16-year old client to a healer from a Maori tribe to cleanse her “auric field” without explaining that the teenager would be repeatedly immersed in a river.

Names of the parties involved in the case – and their addresses – were not published by the Health and Disability Commissioner’s (HDC) report to protect their identities.

The therapist, specialising in Bowen therapy – a remedial hands-on therapy applied using very gentle pressure stimulating the muscles and soft tissue of the body – carried out two successful massage treatments to alleviate the girl’s migraines, muscle pain and menstrual cramps within a month.

The masseuse then explained that she was concerned about the girl’s lack of progress and said the pain could have a non-physical cause. She observed the teen had “six entities” inside her “auric field”. The girl was reportedly visibly distressed and the therapist recommended further treatment with a tohunga (healer) from a local Iwi (a Maori tribe).

Accompanied by the therapist and her aunt, the teenager met the tohunga by a river. The tohunga didn't explain what was going to happen during the treatment, but “immediately started chanting.” She was taken into the deepest part of the river and was then “made to go under” multiple times.

“I felt like I was being drowned,” the girl told the HDC. The healer told her that she was not staying under the water for long enough. She was taken back to the therapist’s house for another Bowen treatment, still in her wet clothes. Later she told her parents that she had found the experience traumatic.

The HDC found the massage therapist had not provided “sufficient information” prior to the river treatment session and the teen was neither able to make an informed choice, nor consent to the procedure.

The HDC was particularly concerned with the urgency with which the referral took place, accepting that the teenager would have felt pressured to undergo the river ritual.

The massage therapist was told to apologise to the teen and review her practice, having breached rights 6(1) and 7(1) of the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers’ Rights 1996.