Massage is a Healthy Choice!

Massage can have significant benefit for muscle pain and is a drug free healthy choice!

I used to consider the occasional massage a blissful, self-indulgent luxury. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more convinced that regular massages are an important prescription for physical and mental well-being.

In fact, there is a growing body of research confirming that massage can be good medicine. “We now know that massage therapy is not just for pleasure, but has significant psychological, physiological and biochemical effects that enhance health,” says Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School, which has conducted more than 100 studies showing that massage’s benefits can include positive effects on depression and anxiety, sleep, stress hormones, immunity and pain relief.

“We have enough data to say the evidence is there that this really does help with back pain in particular,” confirms physician Josephine Briggs, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. She also cites a study published this year in the online journal PLoS One that found that patients with osteoarthritis of the knee who got a weekly 60-minute Swedish massage — a popular, gentle type of bodywork that may include kneading, pressing or stroking the muscles — experienced significant pain reduction and improved function compared with those who received standard care with no bodywork; the gains persisted even after treatment ended. By Carolyn Butler, July 30, 2012