Every couple of months we try and pull together a list of the many benefits of massage therapy (click here or here). We do this because, while writing individually about different benefits of massage therapy week in and week out, it is easy to forget the impressive collection of benefits that massage therapy provides.
Fortunately for this week’s report, another writer has pulled together a pretty thorough list of massage therapy benefits for us. (more…)
We’ve written about massage therapy’s effectiveness in helping reduce post-operative pain in breast cancer patients (click here), however, recent studies have shown that massage therapy’s pain-reducing properties are in no way limited to just breast cancer patients.
The Institute for Integrative Healthcare Studies recently wrote that massage therapy has been shown to provide dramatic results in pain and anxiety reduction for post-operative pain associated with many different surgeries, especially heart surgery. (more…)
Massage therapy can have tremendous benefits for people generally, for example, in dealing with stress (see last week’s entry). But massage’s therapeutic benefits extend to specific groups of people as well. This week I want to focus on how massage therapy can help improve the symptoms and general condition of women with breast cancer.
Continuing on with our blog’s often-explored theme of the benefits of massage therapy for mankind, today’s blog focuses on an element that affects nearly all humans and that massage therapy has a great track record of treating effectively. That element is: stress.
To start off, check out this article from The Massage Advancer, which obviously is a little biased in favor of massage therapy. (more…)
Over the past few weeks, I have written about the therapeutic benefits of massage therapy, specifically for infants and adolescents. Now I want to focus on the therapeutic benefits of massage therapy for all people, children and adults.
This entry will be about jaw pain and ways massage therapy can help combat it. (more…)
After lots of posts about the holidays, NFL stars, and ethics in massage therapy, I want to return to a subject that I think this blog does best: the therapeutic benefits of massage therapy.
After all, massage therapy’s benefits to people’s health are great. Thus far we have featured blogs about massage therapy and its ability to alleviate trigger points, symptoms of old age, allergies, eating disorders, stress, and the list goes on and on.
Today I want to write about neck pain and massage therapy’s effectiveness in treating it. (more…)
In my last two entries about trigger points, I’ve discussed how they have been studied, some ways they are described clinically, and the type of pain they cause for the people who suffer from them. I’ve done this all while maintaining that there is still a lot unknown about trigger points, how they are defined, and the symptoms that they cause. However, that has not stopped massage therapists and others from attempting to discover and treat them, a noble cause considering the incredible amount of pain trigger points can cause (see previous entries as well as the ending paragraph of this entry). (more…)
I wrote last week about trigger points, how they are somewhat hard to define and that this lack of definition has led to many different theories, and an overall lack of consensus, as to how to locate and treat these problematic areas. Figuring out exactly what trigger points are and how to deal with them, definitively, is an extremely important endeavor given the large amount of impact trigger points can have on the general well-being of an individual. (more…)
Massage therapy has been demonstrated to help relieve chronic pain, stress, and anxiety, all in a non-invasive way. For this, it deserves praise as a profession. But there are, of course, limits to what massage can do. Often pain and discomfort is caused by something (such as an internal injury, certain chemical imbalances, etc.) that needs a more invasive approach, and in these cases massage therapy can be used as a supplementary treatment. However, there is also a lot of pain that goes unexplained in the medical world, and this might be due by an element that is difficult to define: trigger points.
Massage has been proven to help relieve the effects of chronic pain, such as back pain, arthritis, and bursitis. And massage’s proven ability to increase circulation means that its other byproducts include an increase in balance and flexibility, improved posture, and improved wellness.
All this means one thing: The field of geriatric massage should be growing rapidly as the above-mentioned benefits are ideal for senior citizens. (more…)