INDIANAPOLIS | Leaders of the state's massage therapy groups shared hugs Wednesday after the Senate Health Committee voted 9-1 to regulate their profession.

Moving legislation out of committee typically is regarded as a first step and hardly cause for celebration. But Indiana's massage therapists have been lobbying for regulation for roughly a decade, and this is the first time they made it past Sen. Patricia Miller's Health Committee.

Still, they only got a half a loaf.

Senate Bill 320 would establish a standard certification process for massage therapists, which Miller, R-Indianapolis, said would offer "title protection." In other words, those who don't meet training requirements for certification couldn't advertise massage services or call themselves massage therapists.

"I still think licensing is what's needed," said Barbara Lis, a Lowell therapist and government relations chair for the Indiana Chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association.

More stringent licensing legislation has cleared the House in recent years, but Miller said she's not ready to draft standards detailed enough to settle differences between therapeutic massage and services more closely related to beauty treatments.

Lis and other advocates have been calling on legislators to approve statewide regulation that would repeal nettlesome local ordinances that, in some cases, require therapists to undergo criminal background checks and get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

Valparaiso officials are watching state lawmakers in the hope they won't need to create a local ordinance to prevent the spa prostitution arrests that went down last month.

"We feel that massage certification is an important tool for law enforcement to crack down on prostitution and other illegal acts," said Rebecca Kasper, lobbyist for the Indiana Association of Chiefs of Police.

Others, mostly independent massage therapists, spoke against the legislation, arguing it would freeze out small entrepreneurs.