Massage Therapy Research is becoming a new part of the massage profession. There are new research studies coming out quite often. Research can help promote the massage profession and help the public to understand more about what it is that we do.

But research is confusing for the most part. The studies are hard to understand and knowing if it really is good research is a challenge for massage therapists. Learning about research methods and what to look for can help you decipher massage research and start referring to research as a way to promote your own practice.

The way to read a research study is to take a look at the massage protocol - how the massage was done and by who. Was it done by a licensed massage therapists or a nurse with no massage training? What is the ‘dose’? What was the length of the session, # of sessions, how much pressure was used and how often were the massages given? What massage techniques were used? What was the sample size- the number of participants? The more participants the better but most studies are usually small because of funding issues. Was there a control or comparison group? This will tell you if they got better because of the massage or would they just have gotten better anyway over time?

These are some of the things to start looking for. As more research becomes available there will hopefully be people helping us to analyze and interpret the results.

The thing about research is that there just isn’t enough of it so that we can say without a doubt “massage can help low back pain” or whatever ailment clients present with.

What it can do is bring us to a place where we can say something like ‘evidence is starting to show that massage can help alleviate low back pain”.

For more information see my site www.thebodyworker.com’s massage therapy research section.

Julio Onofrio
Founder of www.thebodyworker.com

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Tags: massage profession, massage research, massage training, research methods

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.