Massage and cancer

For many years, massage therapists were taught that cancer was a contraindicated medical condition for massage.
This idea was a misconception, based on the mistaken belief that through stimulating circulation, Swedish massage might promote metastasis, the spread of cancer cells from one site to another. This belief was widely publicized by John Kellogg, MD, in his influential text The Art of Massage. Although first published in 1898, this book was still used in some massage schools as recently as the 1980s.

Thanks to the work of pioneering practitioners, such as Gayle MacDonald, Tracy Walton, Debra Curties and many other massage therapists who have donated their services to hospices around the world, we know now that, far from being contraindicated, skillful massage by a knowledgeable therapist is beneficial for people with cancer. In the last few years, research has helped to demonstrate these benefits.

What does the research show? It’s important to remember that with any kind of research, a single study can never “prove” anything to be true. A study can sometimes demonstrate a hypothesis to be false. It more often happens that a body of evidence accumulates gradually over time, with different types of studies contributing different degrees or levels of evidence, as we have stated previously in this column. So, what does the research on massage and cancer have to say? In looking for articles on a topic, it’s often useful to look first for review articles—ones that review a number of studies on a specific topic or research question. These may be nar¬rative reviews, where the authors are summarizing studies that they have selected and adding their own opinions of the articles, or meta-analyses, where the results of studies are combined quantitatively. In a systematic review, the authors attempt to locate all studies—both published and unpublished—on a particular topic and use specified criteria for inclusion and exclusion of the articles selected for review. This article is an example of a narrative review. We will be focusing on two key studies in detail.

To find recent studies on mas¬sage and cancer, we searched PubMed, the free public access por¬tal to MEDLINE, the medical data¬base maintained by the National Library of Medicine (see below for the links to these sites). Searching “massage therapy and cancer” as keywords, we located more than 200 articles, not all of which were relevant. A second search using the strategy “massage therapy and cancer not prostatic not cardiac” retrieved 170 articles. The reason we chose these particular keywords to enter is that there are other kinds of massage performed by physicians and surgeons such as prostatic massage and cardiac massage that are not relevant to our search. Using the “not” command eliminates these articles from our search results and saves time.

We chose these two articles because each is a good example of a recent and well done study, and each has been frequently cited by other authors in the field since its original publication—hallmarks of good research.