Massage Therapy Works to Benefit Illnesses

Massage therapy works to help relieve pain and decrease the discomfort felt by people suffering from various illnesses. Research about the benefits of massage therapy is relatively new. Most notable research has been done by the Touch Institute of Miami.

Tiffany Field Ph.D., a pioneer in massage research, started working on her prematurely born daughter while she was in the hospital. She noticed how touch helped her daughter gain the required weight more quickly than the other babies and decided to do research about the benefits of massage on premature babies. That was in 1982. Ten years later, she founded the Touch Research Institute as part of the University of Miami. The Institute has been doing research about the benefits of massage ever since.

The first study done by the institute was based on the improvement that Field saw in her new daughter years earlier. They massaged a group of premature infants and showed that infants who received massage gained weight 47% faster than infants that weren't massaged and stayed in the hospital an average of 6 days less.

A study on quitting smoking was done by the Touch Research Institute. In the study, one group of people learned self-massage and the other group was the control group. The self-massage group learned to give themselves a simple hand or ear massage when they craved a cigarette. At the end of the study the self-massage group experienced a decrease in withdrawal symptoms.

The Institute has also done extensive research on the benefits of massage on autism, ADHD, anorexia, pregnancy, low-back pain, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, cerebral palsy, spinal-cord injury, asthma and many more. You can find out more about them and their research at their website.

While the Touch Research Institute may have conducted some of the most well-known studies about how massage therapy works, they're not the only ones doing research on massage. Some organizations are doing research on how massage can help treat illnesses you may have never considered that massage could treat. One such example is schizophrenia.

A German study was conducted about the benefits massage might have on people with chronic schizophrenia. Only 10 patients were involved in the study, which is too small a number to get a scientific conclusion. In the study, they found that massage therapy works to relax the patients and the presence of the therapist didn't trigger any anxiety or negative responses in the patients.

The benefits of massage therapy have also been studied on lung and heart transplant patients. The patients were given vibration massage to see if it would help oxygenate tissue and ease discomfort. The massage appeared to have the desired effects but again there weren't enough people in the study to give it real scientific results.

A Traditional Chinese Medicine hospital in Nanjing, China did a study on the benefits of massage on respiratory infections. They found that children with respiratory infections who received massage where significantly better than those who didn't receive massage.

These are just some of the examples of how massage therapy works. You'll find many others as you look around this website. From my own personal experience I know that massage promotes healing, eases stress, and increases comfort in daily life.