Massage not only feels wonderful, research has proved it has myriad health benefits, from controlling pain, to decreasing stress, to reducing heart rate and blood pressure.
"It's been indisputably shown that massage moves blood and lymph through the body," said E. Houston LeBrun, president-elect of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA). "Increasingly, there are research studies being done on the benefits of massage therapy
especially on massage for people with low-back pain and for AIDS patients."
Research in massage therapy has been ongoing for more than 120 years. A recent resurgence in research over the last 30 years has resulted in more than 100 studies being published. AMTA, the international 28,000-member professional association for massage therapists, supports research through the AMTA Foundation. Since 1993, the AMTA and the Foundation have awarded more than $82,000 in grants for researchers to study the effects of massage. Among the findings of the studies:
- Medical school students at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School who were massaged before an exam showed a significant decrease in anxiety and respiratory rates, as well as a significant increase in white blood cells and natural killer cell activity, suggesting a benefit to the immune system.
- Preliminary results suggested cancer patients had less pain and anxiety after receiving therapeutic massage at the James Cancer Hospital and Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio.
- Women who had experienced the recent death of a child were less depressed after receiving therapeutic massage, according to preliminary results of a study at the University of South Carolina.
Studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found massage beneficial in improving weight gain in HIV-exposed infants and facilitating recovery in patients who underwent abdominal surgery. And at the University of Miami School of Medicine's Touch Research Institute, studies have found massage helpful in decreasing blood pressure in people with hypertension, alleviating pain in migraine sufferers and improving alertness and performance in office workers.
Because of Congressional pressure and public insistence, the NIH, the government agency that oversees and conducts medical research in the United States, founded the Office of Alternative Medicine in 1992. As part of the effort to further study therapeutic massage and other alternative treatments, the NIH awarded $10 million in grants to establish 10 centers in the United States to study alternative therapies for a variety of ailments. All are affiliated with major institutions.
Researchers at the Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, will study the effects of massage therapy on pain with their NIH grant. A study at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, will focus on massage after removal of lymph glands during surgery for breast or uterine cancer. Massage therapists will be working with people with HIV and AIDS in a study at Bastyr University AIDS Research Center, Seattle.
AMTA and the AMTA Foundation are helping to fund and collaborating closely with another NIH site. The Center for Alternative Medicine Research at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is conducting a study on the use of alternative treatments, including massage therapy, for lower back pain.
AMTA provides free informational brochures to consumers and helps consumers or health professionals locate qualified massage therapists in their area. 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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