Previous reviews of massage therapy for chronic, non-malignant pain have focused on discrete pain conditions. This article aims to provide a broad overview of the literature on the effectiveness of massage for a variety of chronic, non-malignant pain complaints to identify gaps in the research and to inform future clinical trials. Computerized databases were searched for relevant studies includ...

HYPOTHESIS Adjuvant massage therapy improves pain management and postoperative anxiety among many patients who experience unrelieved postoperative pain. Pharmacologic interventions alone may not address all of the factors involved in the experience of pain. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. SETTING Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Indianapolis, Indiana....

BACKGROUND Because the value of popular forms of alternative care for chronic back pain remains uncertain, we compared the effectiveness of acupuncture, therapeutic massage, and self-care education for persistent back pain. METHODS We randomized 262 patients aged 20 to 70 years who had persistent back pain to receive Traditional Chinese Medical acupuncture (n = 94), therapeutic massage (n = 7...

BACKGROUND Chronic back pain is a major public health problem and the primary reason patients seek massage treatment. Despite the growing use of massage for chronic low back pain, there have been few studies of its effectiveness. This trial will be the first evaluation of the effectiveness of relaxation massage for chronic back pain and the first large trial of a focused structural form of mass...

[Purpose] A scalp massage was conducted on female office workers divided into a 15 minute group and 25 minute group and its effect on stress hormone, blood pressure and heart rate was analyzed in order to provide a theoretical rationale to apply scalp massage as stress therapy. [Subjects and Methods] A scalp massage was applied to 34 female office workers twice a week for a total of 10 weeks; t...

BACKGROUND Uterine massage may significantly reduce post partum blood loss and could be patient-driven. OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of an alarm reminder system for self uterine massage in the prevention of post partum blood loss. DESIGN A random controlled trial. SETTING Meru District Hospital, Kenya. SUBJECTS One hundred and twenty seven (127) women were randomly assigned to ...

Massage has been a therapeutic modality in all cultures since early civilization and has had a long tradition of use in the sporting context. However, there has been a paucity of scientific evidence of the physiological, psychological and therapeutic effects of commonly used massage techniques. This paper reviews the early and more recent studies on the effects of massage and also the more rece...

Methods Practice-based research was used to collect client data (N=321) before and after a massage provided by one of 24 licensed massage therapists in Iowa. The pre-massage survey included items regarding their chief complaint, the client expectations of massage scale, the numeric rating scale for pain, and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Expanded form (PANAS-X). The post-massage sur...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether massage could help preterm infants improve weight gain, discharge from the hospital earlier, and promote the neurobehavioral development, a meta-analysis was conducted. STUDY DESIGN MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Dissertation Abstracts, and the Cochrane Library were searched up to January 2012. There were no language restrictions. RESULTS In all, 611 articles were r...

background: tension and stress are among the factors that lead to hypertension. in most individuals, behavioral strategies, such as relaxation and massage, are effective in controlling the individuals’ response to stress, thus reducing hypertension. methods: this non-blind clinical trial was conducted on 90 patients with primary hypertension. the patients were randomly divided into a control an...