Affective Massage Therapy

In many ways, massage therapy (MT) research is still in its early stages. By the early 1990s, only a handful of researchers had conducted well-designed MT research studies. Some of these went unpublished (for example: Levin SR. Acute effects of massage on the stress response. Master's thesis, probably because there were fewer places to publish MT research then, but a few other studies concerned with specific conditions such as low back pain (1) , or specific populations such as cancer patients (2) , did appear in scientific and professional journals. However, to the best of my knowledge, no one had an ongoing program of MT research during this period. The situation changed, of course, in 1992, with the founding of the Touch Research Institute (TRI). Tif-fany Field and her colleagues established a program of scientific MT research that continues today. As a result , both the quantity and the quality of MT research show an improvement beginning in that year, and by 1998, TRI had conducted enough MT research for Field to publish a narrative review of MT research in the widely-read journal American Psychologist (3). That review highlighted TRI's empirical approach to MT research, in which MT was applied to all manner of specific clinical conditions and populations to see what worked. Individual studies examined the effects of MT on infant growth and development, postoperative pain, cancer. In addition to several condition-and population specific effects, Field's review asserts the existence of a set of more general MT effects that were consistently observed across the individual studies. These effects were reductions of anxiety, depression, and stress hormones. From a research standpoint, those general effects are potentially more illuminating than are any condition-or population-specific effects, because their more basic, fundamental nature makes them a useful foundation for theories that attempt to explain how a treatment works, as opposed to merely determining if it works. Theories rooted in these general effects could both guide and accelerate the research process by suggesting the most fruitful areas and strategies for further research. To better Affective Massage Therapy understand the general effects of MT would be very valuable; therefore, let us examine what is already known about them more carefully. One MT effect—the stress hormone reduction ef-fect—is contentious. Although this effect is widely reported upon as if it were already a scientific fact, quantitative reviews of MT research fail to support a stress hormone reduction …