Continuing on with our blog’s often-explored theme of the benefits of massage therapy for mankind, today’s blog focuses on an element that affects nearly all humans and that massage therapy has a great track record of treating effectively. That element is: stress.
To start off, check out this article from The Massage Advancer, which obviously is a little biased in favor of massage therapy. But the article does bring up some great points about how massage therapy has been clinically proven to reduce levels of stress in patients going through chemotherapy. It also features studies that show massage’s “immediate” benefits in lowering stress levels among young psychiatric patients, as well as massage’s proven abilities in lowering stress levels in the workplace.
Earlier last year, this blog featured data about workplace stress and massage therapy’s effectiveness in combating it (click here to read it). The entry focused on how stress can lead to depression, which, according to The University of Rochester Medical Center, is an incalculable bane on the production levels of companies.
The entry continued on with data from studies done by The Touch Research Institute that show massage therapy’s ability to decrease levels of stress among workers in a way that has been proven chemically in scientific tests. It also cites studies that have shown massage therapy’s ability to help avoid repetitive stress injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, that can occur in offices.
Expanding further, The Massage Advancer cites The Franklin Institute (a center of science in Philadelphia) and the Mayo Clinic as proponents of massage therapy both generally, and for specific, stressful situations, such as dealing with depression and quitting smoking.
And the American Massage Therapy Association points out in its 2009 fact sheet that an increasing amount of hospitals in the United States is using massage therapy to aid in stress management among their patients and staff. We wrote a blog entry almost a year and a half ago that featured information about several Tennessee hospitals that were implementing massage therapy programs to relieve anxiety (stress) among expecting and new mothers. The programs also focused on relieving pain and postpartum depression.
So just in this one posting, five different pages (from four different sites) have demonstrated massage therapy’s proven ability to combat stress and thereby improve the general human condition. With this in mind, it’s no wonder why experts recommend vetting your health insurance plan to find discounts or full-out coverage of massage therapy, and why 60 percent of Americans want massage therapy included in their health care plans.
Aside from the many other benefits massage therapy provides (see another one of our blogs), the important thing to take from this posting is the driving point behind The Massage Advancer article: “Does massage therapy reduce stress? The answer to this question is unequivocally yes.”