Purpose The primary aim of the study was to determine the effects of massage therapy, delivered to post-surgery cardiothoracic patients, on pain, anxiety, relaxation and muscular tension at two different time points and compare it to an equivalent period of rest time. The secondary aims were to explore the effects of massage on heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure, feasibility of tre...

It is well known that massage therapists often develop a number of health problems relatively early on in their career. A preliminary study showed that grounding massage therapists during their work may alleviate some of the health problems they encounter. A doubled-blind randomized controlled trial was designed to examine the effects of working and sleeping grounded for 4 weeks on massage ther...

This paper presents the scientific study of the effectiveness and action principle of head meridian acupoint massage by applying the grey data model analysis approach. First, the head massage procedure for massaging the important head meridian acupuncture points including Taiyang, Fengfu, Tianzhu, Fengqi, and Jianjing is formulated in a standard manner. Second, the status of the autonomic nervo...

BACKGROUND Hypertension has become a major problem throughout the world, especially in developing countries like Iran. As it is a major risk factor for coronary heart disease, even small reductions in the prevalence can have potentially large public health benefits. Among the complementary methods, massage provides an effective means to lower the blood pressure. If nurses perceive the experienc...

PURPOSE At present, there is little scientific evidence that postexercise manual massage has any effect on the factors associated with the recovery process. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of massage against a resting control condition upon femoral artery blood flow (FABF), skin blood flow (SKBF), skin (SKT), and muscle (MT) temperature after dynamic quadriceps exercise. ...

BACKGROUND Research on therapeutic massage bodywork (TMB) continues to expand, but few studies consider how research or knowledge translation may be affected by the lack of uniformly standardized competencies for most TMB therapies, by practitioner variability from training in different forms of TMB, or from the effects of experience on practice. PURPOSE This study explores and describes how ...

The small exploratory study was conducted in a heavily populated urban area in the Midlands region of England. Through semistructured interviews with women working in massage parlours, we investigated the health risks inherent in the work and the strategies adopted by the women to overcome these, as well as examining circumstances where theses strategies could be compromised. The effects of wor...