Word: painful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...group got a 20-minute visit, during which the patient and the therapist talked but no massage was given, and another group received a 20-minute back massage for up to five days following their operations. The massage group, the study found, reported markedly less intense and less unpleasant pain and less anxiety than patients who got standard pain medication or individual attention but no massage. Dr. Daniel Hinshaw, a surgeon in the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and one of the study's co-authors, says that when asked a day after surgery, some patients reported that massage delivered...
...findings come at the end of an eventful year for massage-therapy research. In March, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine published a study finding that Swedish massage, shiatsu foot massage, and acupuncture helped reduce pain and depression in postoperative cancer patients. An October 2007 pilot study by the Mayo Clinic showed that massage significantly reduced pain levels in patients recovering from heart surgery, prompting the internationally renowned treatment center to bring a full-time massage therapist onboard. That same month, the American Massage Therapy Association published a survey...
...been used for centuries in traditional healing. The UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, which has incorporated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and western medicine since 1993, uses massage for most of its 14,000 or so patients each year, who come for treatment of conditions ranging from post-surgical pain to migraines. Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, the center's founder and director, says massage is safe and effective across the board, reflecting one of the core concepts of TCM: using physical methods to help stimulate the body to correct its own chemical flow. "Muscle spasm is not normal," says...
...time - helped those patients. "But now most of the nurses who practice it are retired," he says, and, now, medical training adheres more strictly to quantitative means of evaluating patient progress. So, patients' individual concerns and worries are sometimes swept aside in the process, preventing them from receiving proper pain diagnoses, while certain holistic treatments are less likely to be accepted than conventional western practices. "We'd have to stop practicing medicine" if everything doctors did required back-up by evidence from trials, says Hinshaw, "but we have that evidence for massage. We can see a real effect...
Getting the larger health care system to buy into the idea is another matter. Currently some, but not all, U.S. health insurers cover some form of massage therapy. To gain broader, more mainstream acceptance, Hinshaw says, the treatment will have to prove cost-effective as a pain-reliever. But, in most hospitals, where patients are cycled through intensive care units in a "highly choreographed sequence," there's not a lot of time or imagination to squeeze in massage therapy. Further research, perhaps showing that massage can shorten patients' hospital stays or reduce their analgesics use, may prompt hospitals to include...