Sobada, from the Spanish sobar, to rub or massage, names the therapeutic massage practice of curanderismo, the folk healing tradition of Mexico and the Mexican American borderlands, performed by a sobador or sobadora, a specialist bodyworker whose knowledge and hands are understood within the tradition as a gift, a don, rather than as merely a learned technical skill, echoing curanderismo's broader understanding that effective healing draws on a God given capacity as much as on accumulated knowledge and practice. Sobada is applied to a range of complaints, muscular strain and injury, digestive blockage, and conditions specific to the curanderismo diagnostic framework such as empacho, a folk illness understood as a blockage or ball of undigested food lodged in the digestive tract, treated with specific abdominal massage technique aimed at physically working the blockage loose, a treatment approach that illustrates how curanderismo bodywork often addresses conditions defined within its own traditional diagnostic categories rather than mapping neatly onto biomedical disease classification.