• Impact of Massage Therapy in the treatment of linked patologies: Scoliosis, Costovertebral dysfunction, and Thoracic Outlet Syndrome.pdf
  
  
• Myofascial Trigger points: An Evidence-Informed Review.pdf
  
  
• Complementary & Alternative Medicine for athletes - What you need to know for peak performance.pdf
  
  
• The importance of improving the
  teaching of massage in England
  
  
• Effectiveness of soft tissue massage in the treatment of shoulder pain
  
  
• The importance of research
  
  
• The art and science of sports maintenance massage
  
  
• The low downs on the rub downs
  
  
• Rubbed the wrong way

_

Todays Massage research
(Taken from: Rattray, F., and Ludwig, L. Clinical Massage Therapy. Talus Inc. 2000. Pp8-9)

There seems to be a tendancy today for some therapists to lament that there are no scientific studies to to prove the efects of massage therapy, that the evidence is all empirical. Studies do exist, in English as well as other languages. For example, Yate's A Physician's Guide to Theraputic Massage is based on over 200 articles in scientific, medical and health-sciences literature published from 1885 to 1987 on the effects of massage therapy (Yates, 1990).

More recently Dr Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute at the Miami School of Medicine in Florada is researching the role of touch in health development and the treatment of disease. She has published papers in leading pediatric and psychiatry journals.

Examples of Field's current research include a study which examined the effect of 45 minutes of daily massage on premature babies. It reported that these babies had a 47 percent weight gain compaired to premature babies who received covential treatment and who were not "unnecessarily handled" during hospital care. Another study, on the effects of massage on children with diabetes, revealed that 20 minutes of nightly massage for 30 days improved the subjects' blood glucose levels (Field et al, 1997b).

Perhaps we, as massage therapists, have unrealistic expectations of massage and research in this field. For example, one issue that is questioned (often by the insurance industry) is the long term effectiveness of massage; yet other common forms of treatment are not necessaraly questioned, such as medication and the need for ongoing doses . Field notes that "we've been very concerned about convincing physicians sitting on committees about this and they dont care about the long term effects of massage. They want to know what happens immediately. Physicians know that if you want a drug to work, you have to keep taking it. They could be criticised if they said, "How long... are the effects of the drug?" Its dose dependant typically. Their reasoning is: would you expect if you stopped massaging someone that the positive effects of massage are going to go on any longer than if you stopped someone on a drug. They may have a point. It may be that you need to have a daily or weekly dose in order for the effects to persisit. We do massage assessments on day one and then on day 30. If we look at the base line on day one versus base line on day 30, the latter is better, suggesting an incremental effect of the month of therapy" (Knaster, 1994).

Some concerns with studies that do exist on the effectiveness of massage therapy techniques are that they often neglect to mention which specific techniques are used and the pressure, rate, number of repititions and areas of the body to which the techniques are applied. This makes the studies difficult to reproduce. The terminology used to describe the techniques may vary. Studies also show a lack of consistency in approach so comparisons of techniques are difficult to make (Zadai, 1992).

All this focus on research raises a concern for those therapists who feel that massage therapy is, intuitive, that all its effects can not be measured by scientific methods, nor should they be, and that massage is becoming too medicalised.

Whether we like it or not, the public are seeing massage therapy not only as an alternative to traditional or allopathic medicine, but also as a respected therapeutic approach in its own right. As the public uses massage more frequently,, and if we wnat to attract more people to using massage, the profession finds itself asked more frequently to "prove that massage works in medical terms".

Perhaps a compramise is to use both empirical and scientific methods, combining qualitative and quantitative research, because the positive effects of massage therapy are a combination of physiological and psychological factors.

References:

Field, T., Kuhn, C., LaGreca, A., Shaw, K., and Schanberg, S. Adherance and glucose levels improved after giving massage therapy to children with diabetes. Touchpoints. 1997. Vol.3, No. 4:2.

Knaster, Mirka. Researching Massage as Real Therapy. Massage Therapy Journal. 1994.Vol 33, No 3:56-112

Zadai, C. Pulmonary management in physical therapy. New york: Churchill livingstone.