Massage therapy may not be the cure to all that ails you, but it can help alleviate a variety of maladies, from stress to pain.
Massage doesn't just feel good. It reduces the heart rate and blood pressure, increases blood circulation and lymph flow, relaxes muscles, improves range of motion and increases serotonin, which influences blood flow, and endorphins, which affect pain perception, enhancing medical treatment.
Massage therapy also is helpful in relieving the daily stresses that wear down the body. Therapeutic massage does for the body what a tune-up does for a car.
"It would be difficult to find anything that has the wide range of benefits that massage does," said E. Houston LeBrun, past president of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA). "It's a wonderful way to help your body deal with daily stresses." And, for people with health problems, studies funded by the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine have found:
- abdominal surgery patients recovered more quickly after massage;
- HIV-exposed infants who were massaged gained more weight than those who weren't; and
- cancer patients who had massage therapy while undergoing bone marrow transplants were much less anxious and fatigued.
Physicians are prescribing therapeutic massage for a wide range of medical conditions, including allergies, arthritis, headache, myofascial pain, sinusitis, sports injuries and temporal mandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ).
"Massage therapy is beneficial for almost all diseases. For example, eighty percent of disease is stress-related, and massage reduces stress," said Sandra McLanahan, M.D., a family practitioner in Buckingham, Virginia.
Therapeutic massage involves manipulation of the soft tissue structures of the body to prevent and alleviate pain, discomfort, muscle spasm and stress. It also may improve the rate at which the body recovers from injury and illness.
Therapeutic massage comes in many forms, including Swedish, a gentle, relaxing massage; pressure point therapy for specific diseases and injuries from trigger point and myotherapy to shiatsu and acupressure; and sports massage, focusing on muscle groups relevant to the particular sport. Therapeutic massages can be given under a number of circumstances, from a 15-minute massage of the shoulders and back while the fully clothed recipient sits in a special chair, to an hour-long, head-to-toe massage on a padded massage table to maintain health and assuage aches and pains.
Insurance companies and managed care providers are increasingly recognizing the cost and health advantages of massage therapy and are covering it more often, from Oxford Health Plans on the East Coast, to Kaiser-Permanente in California.
"As massage becomes more mainstream, consumers are becoming concerned about a massage therapist's credentials, and they should be," LeBrun said. "AMTA's code of ethics and practice standards set the highest quality assurance for massage therapists. We can locate a massage therapist who practices by these standards for consumers and health professionals."
Professional members must demonstrate a certain level of knowledge and skill or be graduates of 500-hour training programs accredited or approved by the Commission on Massage Therapy Accreditation (COMTA), or be Nationally Certified in Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork.
AMTA provides free brochures to consumers, and will help consumers and professionals locate qualified massage therapists. Contact AMTA at 820 Davis St., Suite 100, Evanston, IL 60201-4444; phone (847) 864-0123; fax (847) 864-1178; or via the Web at www.amtamassage.org.
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