The Good News and Bad News about the Massage Industry

Massage Therapy is an ever-growing field and, notably, so is its marketability. The demand for consistent and affordable massage therapy increases each year as more people begin searching for healthier alternatives to prescription drugs and invasive surgery. That is the good news. The BAD news is that most of the industry leaders are run by people who have no experience or education in the field itself. Massage Therapy is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach, though the focus of these massage chains is one thing and one thing only; fill empty appointment slots and make more money.

Massage Therapy should be integrative and customizable. The therapist should have the freedom to approach each client situationally and take the time necessary to learn their specific needs. Ideally, even the people scheduling appointments should be scheduling according to therapists’ strengths and client needs … not “first available spot”.

When you are in need of a massage, seek out your local self-employed therapists and small businesses. Find a location and a therapist that seeks to serve you … not just their bottom line.

4 Ways Carrollton Massage Therapy Benefits Runners

Whether you run for fun, competition or stress relief, here are four ways massage therapy can significantly improve your running potential:

1. Reduced Muscle Pain and Fatigue

When you have started a new training program, increased the intensity of your training or are simply just running more mileage, massage therapy can be extremely helpful. Often times, the increased workload results in muscle pain and fatigue. This pain is caused by the release of body-producing toxins such as lactic acid into the tissue. When left untreated, the tissue can become damaged over time. Where there is muscle damage, there is less circulation. Reduced circulation can lead to congestion, tightness and shortening of the tissue.

2. Increased Circulation and Blood Flow

Massage increases circulation and blood flow. With this increased circulation, overall healing is expedited by triggering the immune system to promote a healing response in the tissue.

Following a run, the body needs to recover from the stresses places upon it. When muscles are challenged during a run, the body releases toxins into the tissue. Massage is one of the quickest ways to promote recovery because it helps release these toxins from the tissue. In conjunction with proper hydration, toxins are flushed from the system, thus helping lessen soreness and fatigue while helping freshen your legs for your next workout.

3. Increased Flexibility

Increasing an athlete’s range of motion can help improve performance. When we can move properly, we can run more efficiently.

A good massage helps rebalance the musculoskeletal system. Runners frequently experience pain and tightness in the IT Band, Achilles tendon, knees and hamstrings. Many runners can pinpoint where they are experiencing pain. A good therapist will evaluate pre-exsiting conditions and postural errors that could be contributing to pain, as the source of pain is usually not where the pain is manifesting itself. For example, pain in the hamstring may be attributed to limited lumbar mobility. The hamstring could be over-stretched and compensating for shortening of the hip flexors. The body is like a weight and pulley system. When a muscle experiences fatigue from overuse, another muscle will kick in to try and bring balance back to the body. Often times, this secondary muscle is not meant to sustain that kind of responsibility. When left untreated, it undergoes strain and, much like a domino effect, other muscles become involved and affected. A good therapist will analyze all these factors and develop an appropriate treatment plan to help break a cycle of recurring injury.

4. Relaxation

Lastly, massage promotes relaxation, which has myriad benefits. Relaxing the muscles also helps relax the mind and reduces stress, which can help re-energize you following a big race or tough workout, or even when the craziness of life combined with the demands of training start to wear on you.

When regular massage therapy isn’t an option…

If regular massage therapy isn’t possible, self-treatment can be an effective supplement. Foam rollers, lacrosse balls, tennis balls and massage sticks can be used to provide regular, routine maintenance when you’re not able to be treated by a professional.

When targeting specific areas, pause and press into the sorest areas for about 10 seconds and then release. Focus on frequently stretching the hip flexors, glutes, quads and calves—all important muscle groups for healthy movement.

Have a question? Please feel free to call at 817 919 6751 or email atOTSMassageTherapy@gmail.com

Massage As a Medicine

While massage may have developed a reputation as a decadent treat for people who love pampering,

new studies are showing it has a wide variety of tangible health benefits.

Research over the past couple of years has found that massage therapy boosts immune function in women with breast cancer, improves symptoms in children with asthma, and increases grip strength in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome. Giving massages to the littlest patients, premature babies, helped in the crucial task of gaining weight.

The benefits go beyond feelings of relaxation and wellness that people may recognize after a massage. The American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society now include massage as one of their recommendations for treating low back pain, according to guidelines published in 2007.

New research is also starting to reveal just what happens in the body after a massage. While there have long been theories about how massage works—from releasing toxins to improving circulation—those have been fairly nebulous, with little hard evidence. Now, one study, for example, found that a single, 45-minute massage led to a small reduction in the level of cortisol, a stress hormone, in the blood, a decrease in cytokine proteins related to inflammation and allergic reactions, and a boost in white blood cells that fight infection.

There's been a surge of scientific interest in massage. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, is currently spending $2.7 million on massage research, up from $1.5 million in 2002. The Massage Therapy Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds massage research, held its first scientific conference in 2005. The third conference will be in Boston next year.

The research is being driven, in part, by massage therapy's popularity. About 8.3% of American adults used massage in 2007, up from 5% in 2002, according to a National Health Statistics report that surveyed 23,393 adults in 2007 and 31,044 adults in 2002, the latest such data available. Massage was expected to be a $10 billion to $11 billion industry in 2011 in the U.S., according to estimates by the American Massage Therapy Association, a nonprofit professional organization.

"There is emerging evidence that [massage] can make contributions in treating things like pain, where conventional medicine doesn't have all the answers," said Jack Killen,NCCAM's deputy director.

The massage therapy field hopes that the growing body of research will lead to greater insurance coverage for its treatments. Washington is the only state that requires insurers to cover massage therapy.

Elsewhere, private insurers generally provide very limited coverage for massage. WellPoint,for example, doesn't include massage as a standard benefit in most of its plans, but employers can purchase alternative medicine coverage as an add on, said spokeswomanKristin E. Binns. Aetna doesn't cover massage therapy as a standard benefit but offers members discounts on massage visits with practitioners who are part of an affiliated network of alternative medicine providers. Providers such as chiropractors or physical therapists, whose visits are often covered, sometimes use massage as part of their treatment.

Massage therapists charge an average of about $59 for a one-hour session, according to the American Massage Therapy Association. Treatments at posh urban spas, however, can easily cost at least three times that amount.

Most of the research is being done on Swedish massage, the most widely-available type of massage in the U.S. It is a full-body massage, often using oil or lotion, that includes a variety of strokes, including "effleurage" (gliding movements over the skin), "petrissage" (kneading pressure) and "tapotement" (rhythmic tapping).

Another common type of massage, so-called deep tissue, tends to be more targeted to problem muscles and includes techniques such as acupressure, trigger-point work (which focuses on little knots of muscle) and "deep transverse friction" where the therapist moves back and forth over muscle fibers to break up scar tissue.

Massage is already widely used to treat osteoarthritis, for which other treatments have concerning side effects. A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2006 showed that full-body Swedish massage greatly improved symptoms of osteoarthritis of the knee. Patients who had massages twice weekly for four weeks and once a week for an additional four weeks had less pain and stiffness and better range of motion than those who didn't get massages. They were also able to walk a 50-foot path more quickly.

"If [massage] works then it should become part of the conventionally recommended interventions for this condition and if it doesn't work we should let [patients] know so they don't waste their time and money," says Adam Perlman, the lead author of the study and the executive director of Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, N.C.

Scientists are also studying massage in healthy people.

In a small study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine last month, a 10-minute massage promoted muscle recovery after exercise. In the study, 11 young men exercised to exhaustion and then received a massage in one leg. Muscle biopsies were taken in both quad muscles before exercise, after the massage and 2½ hours later.

The short massage boosted the production of mitochondria, the energy factory of the cell, among other effects. "We've shown this is something that has a biological effect," says Mark Tarnopolsky, a co-author of the study and a professor of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University Medical Center in Hamilton, Ontario.

A 2010 study with 53 participants comparing the effects of one 45-minute Swedish massage to light touch, found that people who got a massage had a large decrease in arginine-vasopressin, a hormone that normally increases with stress and aggressive behavior, and slightly lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in their blood after the session. There was also a decrease in cytokine proteins related to inflammation and allergic reactions.

Mark Hyman Rapaport, the lead author of the study and the chairman of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, says he began studying massage because, "My wife liked massages and I wasn't quite sure why. I thought of it as an extravagance, a luxury for only people who are very rich and who pamper themselves." Now, Dr. Rapaport says he gets a massage at least once a month. His group is now studying massage as a treatment for generalized anxiety disorder.

Knead to Know Tips

• How can you make sure you get a good massage? Most states regulate massage and require therapists to be licensed. This usually requires a minimum number of hours of training and an exam. There is also national certification. Members of the American Massage Therapy Association must have 500 hours of training.

• Ask how many massages a therapist gives a day—and make sure you're not the 10th or even the seventh. 'It takes a lot of physical exertion to deliver a therapeutic massage,' says Ken Morris, spa director at Canyon Ranch, a health resort in Tucson, Ariz. Canyon Ranch limits its therapists to six massages in a day.

Have a Migraine?

Do you ever have clients complain of repeated headaches? Chronic migraines, chronic tension-type headaches, and chronic cluster headaches are also known as primary chronic headaches.

These primary chronic headache conditions affect about 3% of the general population, occurring predominately in females. These conditions have a significant impact on quality of life as well as economic and social costs.

This month's Massage Therapy Foundation article review focuses on a systematic review by

Norwegian researchers Chaibi and Russell of the efficacy of manual therapy randomized clinical trials (RCT) for primary chronic headaches published in The Journal of Headache and Pain in 2014.

Chaibi and Russell note that about 80% of people affected by primary chronic headaches consult their primary physician, in which pharmacological management is often the first line of treatment. However, they point out that nearly half of medication users overuse medication, putting them at risk of overuse for headache attacks. As such, non-pharmacological management should be considered as a viable option for managing this condition. The authors contend that non-pharmacological management for primary chronic headaches have the advantage of few and usually minor adverse effects and no adverse pharmacological interactions.

Chaibi and Russell conducted a literature search on CINHAL, Cochrane, Medline, Ovid and PubMed, which ultimately identified six RCTs. All six studies investigated chronic tension-type headache. The primary focus for their review was the frequency of headaches and secondarily, intensity and/or duration. The literature search found one study that applied massage therapy and five studies that applied physiotherapy. Though all were published in English, the studies were conducted around the world, including United States, Spain, Turkey, Denmark, and the Netherlands from 1989 to 2011. Of these six studies, four were considered to be of good methodological quality. The studies were pragmatic or used no intervention for a control group, and only two studies avoided using another intervention along with the manual therapy which may result in bias and makes interpretation of the results more difficult.

Review of the selected RCT studies suggest that massage and physiotherapy are effective treatment options in managing chronic tension-type headaches. One of the RCTs showed that physiotherapy reduced headache frequency and intensity better than usual care. The efficacy of physiotherapy at post-treatment and at six months follow-up was shown to equal the efficacy of antidepressants. While the massage study only had 11 subjects, it did show a greater reduction in headache intensity than the ultrasound control group. Based on this systematic review, the authors recommend that manual therapies be considered equally with medication management in headache treatment.

The authors indicated that their literature review might have possible biases, as they did not attempt to identify unpublished RCTs. They also reported that though they performed a comprehensive search, it is possible they overlooked one or more RCTs, especially those published in non-English.

Chaibi and Russell suggest the quality of methodology used in studies assessing manual therapies for headache disorders are frequently criticized for being too low. They recommend future manual therapy RCTs follow the recommendations of the International Headache Society with a focus on headache frequency primarily and secondarily, duration and intensity. Additionally, they state that manual therapy studies are needed for chronic migraine with and without medication overuse.

This review provides important findings suggesting that massage and physiotherapy are effective treatment options in managing chronic tension-type headaches. These findings support the use of these therapies by practitioners to help clients treat chronic tension-type headaches in clinical and non-clinical settings.

Are you interested in learning more about the uses of manual therapies to alleviate pain and promote quality of life for patients? To learn more about the effects of massage therapy, you can read the Massage Therapy Foundation review article archives, review accepted MTF Research Grant abstracts, or search PubMed for massage therapy studies.

Looking for quality online continuing education? Consider the Basics of Research Literacy course. This online continuing education course is for all massage practitioners and educators offered by the Massage Therapy Foundation and Education and Training solutions. You can explore the basics of incorporating principles of research literacy into your practice or school curriculum at your own pace. For more information and to sign up for the class, visit www.massagetherapyfoundation.org.

Have a question? Please feel free to call at 817 919 6751 or email at OTSMassageTherapy@gmail.com