Massage For Pain Relief

You may associate massages with relaxation, but you might want to start associating them with pain relief. Instead of using opioids, message may be an option for pain relief. Researchers from the Samueli Institute in Virginia looked at databases of medical studies to find those testing massage for the treatment of pain. They included 60 high-quality studies and seven low-quality studies that looked at how massage impacted things like muscle and bone pain, chronic pain and spinal chord pain.

Three to four studies looked at people with muscle and bone pain, and showed that compared to no therapy, massage had a very large effect on pain. Study leader Dr. Wayne Jonas notes that the evidence may change if a large high-quality study is ever done looking at massage therapy compared to other treatments.

In an editorial, researchers from the Defense and Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management write, "Massage therapy will not remove the need for for medications in pain management and it will not be an appropriate therapy for every patient, but it should be considered as a routine complementary, not alternative, part of an individual multimodal, and stepped care pain plan for pain management."

I think massage therapists can put the sleeping pill companies out of business. I'm for swapping massage for some pain killers, within reason.