Sunday, September 6, 2009

Question from a massage practitioner: Are there any healing arts out there with solid evidence-based outcomes?

Resolved Question

Question from a massage practitioner: Are there any healing arts out there with solid evidence-based outcomes?

Western medicine has been largely bought by the pharmaceutical industry which only masks most symptoms. A few surgeries are necessary. Antibiotics are the only drug that actually cure disease, insulin is life-saving for diabetics, and drugs like anti-convulsives save lives. Most of the rest do nothing or harm.

Most "Traditional Chinese Medicine" is unscientific and unproven to work.

I am a massage practitioner and know it's largely useless as well, except for temporary relaxation. It's riddled with quackery such as Craniosacral Therapy which has been proven over and over to do nothing.

Do you have experience with legitimate healing as a practitioner or patient?

Additional Details

I've heard of the Shand's research but haven't checked in on it lately. I'll do that.

2 days ago

Duh, PUBMED! Thanks, Tink. I tell others about it but haven't looked at it myself in years. What a hypocrite!

2 days ago

Alright, Momma of 3. I would like to be proud of massage. If you can provide links to research studies proving its efficacy, that would help. I have never seen any, so just saying they exist does not help me at all.

2 days ago

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

I suggest you get familiar with PUBMED and the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (the guys in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a few other health agencies, such as the NIH...) also do some research into "alternative" methods....

You can go to those sites and look it up....
PUBMED is by far the easiest to use....
But it comes down to the terms...such as orthopedic manipulation, etc...

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Other Answers (5)

  • Oh you are so wrong about your profession! I worked at a children's chiropractic center and we employed massage therapists (as well as chinese practitioners) to work on the children. The massage therapists truly helped the children. I saw the children improve with my own eyes.

    There are studies that have proven that your profession, as well as chiropractic can help. Be proud of your profession!

    Source(s):

  • I have no idea if this will answer your question, but I know for a fact that there is a doctor at Shand's hospital at the University of Florida doing research on acupuncture. He is trying to see exactly if and how it works on pain receptors.

    Source(s):

  • "Western medicine has been largely bought by the pharmaceutical industry which only masks most symptoms."

    Bizarre.
  • I've been a LMT for almost 23 years. After massage school I have taken thousands of hours of continuing ed. I agree that relaxation massage has it's limitations. That is why I concentrated on pain treatment/management. I practice a wide variety of techniques such as NMT,Myofascial Trigger Point Therapy, Muscle Energy Techniques,Positional Release, and on and on. What I am getting at is, you don't have to limit yourself to just relaxation massage. There are SO many ways a MT can make a positive impact on their patients. After all these years I still find what I do exciting and very rewarding. If you want to read something interesting, go to www.hurleyosborn.com. You sound like you are bummed out about your choice of professions. Please take another look....The purpose of life should be,to have a purpose in life.Corny I know,but true
  • You might be going down the wrong track.

    Massage therapy is a rehabilitation discipline, not a medical discipline.

    I've studied research over the past few years, and very little has shown massage to change the course of a disease or pathology. The evidence that is out there is low on the totem pole as to what is considered true evidence.

    That all being said, massage has been shown to improve function--physical function (like an increase in ROM), practical function (like increased engagement in ADL's) and cognitive function (increased math abilities and concentration).

    My opinion is that "medical massage" is a misnomer, and anyone using the word is playing off an uninformed public.
    "Remedial massage" or "Rehabilitative massage" is probably more accurate terminology for those therapists aiming at something above just a plain out relaxing massage.

    Touch Research Institute has done a great deal of research with massage, but I am sometimes skeptical of their outcomes, Seems that no matter what they test massage on, it's shown somehow that massage was a benefit. Statistically, it is very unlikely that massage would help with everything that it is tested on.

    Source(s):

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