Bette Kaplan

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An international study sought to determine whether patients with advanced cancer found massage, aromatherapy, and/or reflexology to be effective.Are palliative care interventions effective in people coping with advanced cancer? A group of palliative care specialists in the United Kingdom sought to find out. They knew that the anxiety and depression that oncologists often associate with advanced disease can result from the serious issues these patients are dealing with, such as living with relentless pain, anticipating their approaching mortality, and leaving behind the people they love. According to the World Health Organization, the goal of palliative care should be to enhance quality of life while easing the pain cancer patients experience.1 Unfortunately, this cannot always be accomplished with medication and other conventional interventions. In fact, in a 2014 UK survey, palliative care specialists reported that they had difficulty managing their patients’ anxiety. 2 For these reasons, the British group decided to “explore other avenues that may improve well-being and symptoms in a palliative care population.” 1
Varied Interest in Palliative Modalities
Of course, traditional and complementary therapies are not exclusive of one another. For example, palliative care patients often find their pain reduced and their mood boosted by noncontact therapies such as music therapy while they undergo conventional treatments.1 The 21-country European Social Survey found that the popularity of complementary therapies varied by country. For example, only 10% of patients in Hungary received such treatment, whereas in Germany, almost 40% utilized complementary therapies. People who had health problems utilized complementary therapies 2 to 4 times more often than healthy people.3 The manual body-based therapies that involve the touch of a therapist — massage, aromatherapy, and reflexology — are the most popular, so the UK group decided to focus on those in their recent review. 
Study participants were aged 18 years or older; at least half of them were in hospice, another palliative care situation, or undergoing treatment for advanced disease with palliative intent. Participants had also participated in discussions about how effective they found modalities such as aromatherapy, massage, or reflexology. 1 The UK group searched databases in The Cochrane Controlled Register of Trials using variations of the terms palliative, aromatherapy, reflexology, and massage.

By ANNE CHAO

 The reason behind the rise in support for massage therapy to relieve back pain is simple: it works.
Back pain, especially low back pain, is a very common complaint among adults. Most adults report experiencing back pain at some point in their lives.

Anyone who suffers from back pain knows that even easy tasks can become difficult and painful, including bending over, tying shoelaces and lying down comfortably.
Massage therapy is clinically proven to decrease tension in the back and neck. In fact, numerous studies suggest the massage therapy relieves back pain and reduces inflammation.
A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine determined that low back pain sufferers who received one hour of weekly massage therapy for 10 weeks felt less pain than the group who had physical therapy and pain management. The benefits of these regular massage treatment relieved pain for up to 6 months or more.
Another study from the University of Kentucky and Indiana University showed similar results. Of the 104 individuals with persistent low back pain more than 50 percent of participants reported improvement after 10 massage therapy sessions over 12 weeks with a professional massage therapist. After 24 weeks 75 percent of the group said that they still felt better.


Working regular massage into your wellness plan improves how you feel for many reasons.
Massage treatments are designed to stretch and knead various layers of muscles and tendons. These movements break up the muscle knots and fibers, which provides relief.
Massage increases blood flow, helps muscles to recover more quickly and reduces soreness. Additionally, researchers believe that the benefits of massage reach beyond physical activity, because studies show that massage therapy improves vascular function for both active and inactive people.
Swedish massage and deep tissue massage methods have been found to be equally effective in reducing back pain. Both the massage and the relaxation experienced from having the massage are beneficial to someone with back pain.
Massage therapy, acupressure and trigger point therapy all release endorphins, or “happy” hormones, which creates a feeling of well-being and happiness. This phenomenon reduces pain levels, too. Just 15 minutes of massage therapy can result in up to two days of feeling good.
Superficial heat during massage enhances the benefits of massage therapy, also. Hot stones or hot towels can be included with a massage to optimize relaxing muscles and releasing tension.
At Massage Concepts, various add-on services, therapies and enhancements are available for you to personalize your massage session, such as hot stones, essential oils, Tiger Balm pain ointments, and CBD oil.
It can take weeks or even months to completely recover from a flare-up of back pain. In the meantime, massage offers relief in addition to conventional care, such as taking anti-inflammatory pain relievers, staying as active as possible, getting physical therapy, and waiting for the body to heal.
Regular massage therapy sessions are important to achieve optimal results. Discuss the best schedule with your healthcare provider and massage therapist.
Before adopting massage therapy as part of your wellness plan, always check with your doctor. Sometimes massage is not recommended for an individual due to specific health concerns.

• Stacey Thomas
  


• Chronic pain is one of the most common musculoskeletal ailments, plaguing an enormous portion of the population.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a report released in late 2018, about 50 million U.S. adults, or 16 percent of the adult population, experience chronic pain.
As pain science has progressed, so has our approach to assessing and treating chronic pain.
Thankfully, taking an overall approach is becoming more the norm rather than the exception these days. A merger of bio-psycho-social and manual therapies enables us to build treatment plans that can create a positive systemic change with less-aggressive, more holistic methods and longer-lasting results.
Touch that Removes the Threat of PainOne can make numerous observations regarding the physical presentation of the issue, but gaining an understanding of how the client relates to their pain is equally as important.
While movement assessment provides the kinetic clues, the emotional and neurological weight of the pain can have a profound effect on our client’s perception of their ability to move, their access to certain ranges of motion, adoption of guarded movement patterns, and even internal opinions on their ability to heal at all.
More often than not, successful treatment starts by first removing the perceived threat of danger and pain.
Before a nervous system is receptive to making changes in tissue tone and pattern of movement, it has to feel safe to do so. A number of gentle and novel methods can be used to achieve this.
A touch that relaxes the nervous system such as light feathering and effleurage, the application of analgesic at the site of pain in the beginning of the session, heat, ice, light IASTM, kinesiology tape and even using cups as neurological cueing and gamification have the potential to reduce the tension in a guarded presentation.
These methods open the doors for treatments such as correcting a breathing pattern, restoring stability and addressing postural dysfunction that contribute to the chronic pain. These methods also give the client access to potentially pain-free ranges of motion and activities that they had previously been avoiding.
Brain SmudgingThe psychological impact of restoring movement without pain has a direct impact on the client’s sense of well-being, their sympathetic nervous system, and their motor control center’s ability to learn and adapt new movement patterns.
Areas of chronic pain will often have decreased proprioception and sensory awareness.
Think of it like the GPS in your car. If the GPS can’t find a destination, it certainly can’t tell you how to drive there. This loss of accuracy and awareness is known as brain smudging.
Using simple two-point discrimination methods — whereby the client is asked if they can perceive two points of stimuli presented simultaneously — can establish the client’s margins of cortical mapping and direct your focus of treatment area for re-establishing the neural connections.
Once those connections are made, we again have an open neurological doorway through which we can positively impact the sensation of pain, proprioception, and ultimately, movement.
Assessing MovementWhen it comes to assessing movement, it’s important to incorporate what’s meaningful to the client.
For example, if a client presents with pain during a particular yoga pose, assessing that movement is both relevant and powerful for gaining buy-in. Utilizing additional assessment methods is at your clinical discretion and the treatment plan should include things that directly correlate with the client’s goal of restoring and even bettering the meaningful movement.
Combining manual and movement therapy off the table can have dynamic effects that some static interventions may lack. Using a graded exposure approach for these progressions is key.
For example, taking a client from a passive, supine range of motion in the hip to an open-chain, active movement pattern while you’re applying treatment, then to a closed chain progression in which ranges of motion are increased according to pain-free abilities, would be an example of graded exposure.
Treatment during all of these examples could include manual therapy, cupping, flossing, IASTM or visual cueing.
Go Beyond the TableAs we understand the science of how pain dictates movement, behavior and even impacts our social environments, it becomes even more important for us to broaden our lens and methods of practice.
Learning a holistic model of assessment and treatment methods that go beyond the table benefits the client — as well as the massage therapist.
About the Author:
Stacey Thomas, LMT, SFMA, FMS, NKT, ART, CF-L2, has been a movement specialist since 1997, and licensed as a sports massage therapist since 2005. You can usually find her teaching a RockTapeclass, speaking at national massage conventions or camping with her dog, Charlie.