Jump to navigation. For some, massage therapy is a short-term intervention to help with injury and rehabilitation. For others, massage is their salve to reduce the stresses of a hurried and chaotic life. Wherever you are on the spectrum of health care, massage offers many valuable benefits to those who receive it. From the earliest days of humankind, when one person reached out to soothe another, we have known that welcomed physical contact is good for us.
The loving touch that occurs between infants and their caregivers helps to create a sense of safety in the world that follows us for a lifetime. Touch that occurs between humans helps us to build our foundational relationships, supports social interaction, enables emotional sharing, and provides many other benefits Gentsch, Brendtro.
By contrast, prolonged touch deprivation is connected with failure to thrive and the inability to create social attachments when it happens in infants and young children Jakubiak , and with shorter lifespans and more illness in isolated elders Butts. We know that touch is a basic human need, but we live in a society with few appropriate venues for physical contact.
Massage therapy is an intervention that meets that need. Defining massage turns out to be a tricky proposition. Many cultures across the globe have traditional touch-related protocols designed to promote health, but not all practitioners of these arts would consider their work to be massage. For this resource we have pulled together findings from small-scale projects that might have just a few participants, substantial clinical trials, and large-scale systematic reviews and meta-analysesβthese are compilations of multiple studies that combine results.
Each study comes from a peer-reviewed academic publication. While most research is conducted in the context of illnesses or conditions, some studies have looked at bodywork for healthy people, and concluded that massage therapy for wellness or for stress relief is consistently effective in a variety of ways. Even a simple hand massage appears to move healthy people into a relaxed state Kunikata.
