Massage: Helping Clients

Increasingly, consumers and employers are turning to massage to help alleviate the physiological and affective consequences of stress, despite the limited research on the subject. To date, while there is substantial evidence that massage therapy reduces muscle tension, there is mixed evidence of massage decreasing cortisol levels and activating the PNS—all good for combating stress. The inconsistent findings of reduced cortisol levels across studies may be at least partially explained by the fact that some of the subjects suffered from PTSD, which may have altered their cortisol levels. Therefore, a broader review of the massage therapy research linked to stress is needed. The Massage Therapy Foundation has initiated a comprehensive literature review ofmassage research on stress, which should be published in the near future in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Albert Moraska, PhD lead researcher of the review and assistant research professor at the University of Colorado Health Science Center, says, “The self-reported scales seemed to offer the most consistent sense of massage therapy’s value in helping people to deal with the consequences of stress.” However, he believes there is also support for including both cortisol and self-reported measures in future research so that their consistency could be compared. The growing numbers of people who are repeatedly turning to massage as an antidote to stress offers strong evidence of its value, even as we wait for more research to confirm it.