Last week I wrote about acupressure, defining the modality and describing its benefits generally. This week I want to examine the specific benefits acupressure provides, as detailed in recent scientific research.
The first study comes from a 2010 issue of the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which demonstrated acupressure’s ability to decrease pain levels in patients suffering from chronic neck pain. (more…)
We’ve written about the magic of massage therapy before, and how it helps mothers (and fathers) relieve tension, lower their blood pressure, and reduce their anxiety, both before birth and after.
But a new study published in the May 2010 edition of Women’s Health reveals perhaps the most startling conclusion of all: Massage therapy can actually help women during labor. (more…)
We’ve been writing over the past few weeks about medical massage therapy and the difficulty of defining what it is exactly. While we reached a fairly bland definition last week, what’s more important is that now, more than ever, people are beginning to use massage therapy for medical situations and in medical environments. (more…)
Often, especially when writing about massage, the human angle of the benefits that massage therapy provides can be lost. This blog is surely guilty of this crime, extolling the proven virtues of massage therapy by noting the publication of studies or work of professional organizations.
But then stories like this one from the Arizona Daily Star come along and remind you exactly what the proven benefits of massage therapy translate to: an improvement of the human condition.
An increasing number of pediatric health care practitioners are incorporating massage to compliment treatment as well as to provide comfort to ill children. The Touch Research Institute has studied the role that pediatric massage can play in the improvement of serious illness symptoms and the results have shown that massage can play a significant role in the healing process. (more…)