Posts Tagged ‘medical massage therapy’

Massage Therapy as the Aspirin of CAM Therapies

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

CAM therapies are Complementary and Alternative Medicine treatments that help alleviate symptoms without relying on pharmaceuticals or more invasive medical treatments like surgery. While there are many CAM therapies out there, I wonder if any have as many potential diagnoses as does massage therapy.

Consider that:

o Massage therapy has been demonstrated to help treat symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, lowering levels of pain, anxiety and depression while improving physical sensation and muscle movements. (more…)

Sports Massage Therapy for Runners

Monday, December 27th, 2010

We’ve written generally about massage therapy and its benefits for athletes (see our entry on Sports Massage), but often times a description of the general benefits can gloss over the specific positives sports massage provides athletes of a specific sport. Today’s Blog will focus on running and how sports massage can help runners. (more…)

Exploring Massage Therapy: Acupressure (Part II)

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

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…)

Massage Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis: An Effective CAM Therapy

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

As we have written, massage therapy is an excellent Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), and can be a CAM therapy for many different conditions (for example, see last week’s entry on burns and massage therapy). Recent research has shown massage therapy to be effective in dealing with symptoms on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) as well. (more…)

Massage Therapy Shown as an Effective Complementary Treatment for Burn Patients…Again

Friday, November 12th, 2010

Most people, especially readers of this Blog, know that massage therapy can be a soothing complementary treatment to medical conditions such as cancer and asthma. New research is showing that massage therapy can help burn patients as well, a conclusion that backs up similar research done from the past decade. (more…)

Massage Therapy and Veteran’s Day

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Last month I wrote a Blog post that was somewhat critical of the Massage Therapy Journal, a publication put out by the American Massage Therapy Association. Today, with Veteran’s Day coming up next week, I want to commend the AMTA for its publication of an article about massage therapy and how specific organizations are trying help today’s veterans with massage therapy. The article is not available online, but I sourced it below – it’s a great read for therapists looking to give back to a very deserving segment of the population. (more…)

Massage Therapy Helps Before, After – and During?!? – Birth

Friday, October 1st, 2010

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…)

Massage Therapy in the Medical Field (Part III)

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

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…)

Massage Therapy in the Medical Field (Part II)

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

We wrote last week about the difficulty of defining medical massage therapy, as its definition can vary state-by-state or by municipality.

Indeed, the lack of a national or professional definition leaves medical massage therapy’s determination very nebulous. (more…)

Massage Therapy in the Medical Field (Part I)

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

We talk about the therapeutic and medicinal benefits of massage therapy so often that it seems important to actually define what medical massage therapy is exactly. The hard part, of course, is that medical massage therapy lacks clear definition across, and within, America’s 50 states. As we’ll explore in a series of blogs, there are many players who determine the current definition of medical massage therapy, and, so far, an exact definition of the term has yet to be reached.

(more…)