It happens more often than she’d like. Butte County sheriff’s Supervisor Becky Callas jerks awake in the dead of night, fighting the nagging memories of her community burning to the ground in the worst fire in California history. Or her mind is brimming with endless to-do lists for the area’s recovery.
That’s when she reaches for an odd little device that over the past dozen years has helped countless war veterans overcome post-traumatic stress.
It’s called a Temple Massager — a wishbone-shaped, manually operated gizmo that looks deceptively simple, but is proving to be unexpectedly profound for hundreds of people like Callas who fought November’s catastrophic Camp Fire in Butte County.
Like so many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they may have survived the fire, but the lasting stress of what they endured combined with the mountain of community recovery work before them has left little or no time for personal recovery.
That’s where the massager comes in handy.
The device resembles a stethoscope, with a pair of nubs positioned to be set on a person’s temples. A few strokes by the nubs quickly relieves headaches, facial and jaw tension, and tamps down stress enough to put the user back to sleep. The Temple Massage has proved so effective that it has been quietly added to the tool kit for soldiers and veterans around the world for post-traumatic stress treatment alongside medications and counseling.
And now Camp Fire responders, like Callas, are finding it useful, much to their delight.
“It’s pretty awesome. It makes my eyes roll back in my head, which I guess is a good thing,” Callas, 57, said with a laugh. “Seriously, when you suffer through a lot of stress like all of us did, it affects your sleep, headaches, teeth grinding, and more. And this thing, the way it addresses so many nerve endings in your face, it’s really effective.”
"We Were All Just Really Fried"
Like so many of her fellow first responders, Callas is one tough cookie, having worked in law enforcement for decades, starting as a regular officer and working her way up to assistant police chief in Colorado before being hired by the sheriff. So when Temple Massager inventor Joe Meisch called her after the fire from his home in Cazadero to offer 80 of his gadgets to firefighters and law enforcement agents for free, she blew him off. There was work to be done.
“I was deep in the weeds of handling the aftermath and recovery like everyone else around here, so I avoided him,” said Callas, who is the sheriff’s fiscal manager and supervises the county Critical Incident Stress Management Team. “We were all just really fried. But he’s pretty persistent. So I finally called him back and he brought these things up to our monthly meeting in February.”
She was quickly persuaded.
“I tell you this, we’ve been really glad to have them,” Callas said. “We’re still getting our butts kicked by that fire’s aftermath, and this massager has been good for a lot of people.”
Genesis of the Temple Massager
Meisch, an Army veteran, has gotten used to hearing that kind of gratitude in the decade or so since he invented his oddball device and started giving it away to help reduce PTSD.
He came up with the idea in 1997 while he was an Army engineer and fighting the beginnings of PTSD himself, having seen one of his buddies drown in a training exercise despite rescue efforts by Meisch and his patrol. While driving home from an Allman Brothers concert, he found that rubbing his temples with the earpieces of his sunglasses relieved his stress headache — but when he later looked for a temple massager he could buy, he couldn’t find one.
He started researching facial massage and acupressure. Meisch got his honorable discharge from the service in 2000 after a 13-year hitch, and by 2007 he had his patent and production in place and started giving his Temple Massager away. In addition to the rubbing points, the handle comes with a tiny reservoir so lavender or other aromatherapy oils can be added to the experience.
Some of his first shipments went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Navy Medical Center, both in Maryland. He followed that with donations to the Navy seaport in Bahrain and Marines base Camp Pendleton. He’s also sending them to active Army soldiers on the Iraq and Afghanistan battlefronts, and veterans clinics from Fort Bragg to Palo Alto.
Letters soon started coming back from doctors and military officials, with one Army commander calling the massager a “natural stress relief mechanism” during deployment. A psychologist treating vets in Fort Bragg wrote that it was “a creative, non-invasive adjunctive treatment which is having beneficial effects for our veterans.”
"I am on a Mission of the Heart"
So when the Camp Fire devastated Butte County last fall, incinerating most of the town of Paradise as well as the homes of more than 100 law enforcement officers and firefighters, Meisch made his call to Callas. The Wine Country fires had savaged Sonoma County, where he lives, just a year before. He knew viscerally how much the first responders would be hurting.
“I am on a mission from the heart, and I know that sounds corny, but it’s true,” said Meisch, who is 53 and makes his living working in construction. “I do sell a few of these massagers on the internet, but I don’t really care about the money. I’m just trying to help people.”
So far, Meisch has given out 2,800 Temple Massagers. He’s sold 300, with prices starting at $60 apiece.
In Butte County, the massagers are placed at fire stations and police departments, and users are filling out survey forms about their effectiveness. The first results came in last week, and the main benefit so far has been to help people sleep.
A similar, but much more intensive survey and study of the device is being conducted at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in Palo Alto, where about 20 of the massagers have been used by patients since Meisch sent them there nearly two years ago.
What Keeps Inventor Going
Even though Meisch is no scientist — he has a bachelor’s degree in geography — he did his homework and produced a useful tool, said Maheen Adamson, senior scientific research director at the brain center and a Stanford associate professor. Like most therapeutic tools, it’s not the wonder fix to end all fixes — but it sure does help, she said.
“The patients have all liked it and said nice things about it,” said Adamson. “It’s a good complementary device, and I’m hoping to test it for a couple more years.”
Test approval is nice, Meisch said, but what brings him the most satisfaction is getting an email like the one he got in 2016 from a U.S. soldier serving in South Korea begging for a massager because he was having “the worst time in my life.”
Meisch shipped it, for free as usual. A month later the soldier wrote again. Because of the Temple Massager, he said, “the past four weeks have been OK, and that is substantial for me, more than I can describe. Four weeks of feeling ok, vs 17 months of intense anxiety, panic attacks and suicidal ideations, is substantial. I owe quality gratitude to you.”
After reading the email again last week, Meisch paused for a moment, filled with emotion. “These are the things that keep me going,” he said softly. “This is the stuff I use to light my way.”
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