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Lessons from research will help us to…lay the foundations for a new type of treatment, whose essence is to combat disease by strengthening the body's own defenses against stress.

Han Selye, M.D.

The Stress of Life, 1956

Massage Therapy Research

Although massage therapy has been used for thousands of years for its health-promoting potential, only recently have its effects been the subject of scientific investigation. In 1992, the first major institute in the world devoted to the scientific study of touch and its applications in medicine was created by the University of Miami's Touch Research Institutes (TRI).

TRI's director, Tiffany Field, Ph.D., began her work by studying how touch affected premature infants, who are generally kept in isolation after birth. She had been inspired by the groundbreaking work of anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who had written about the dramatic positive effect touch had on the survival rate of orphaned infants in his book Touch: The Human Significance of the Skin (1971).

Dr. Field's initial study, published in 1980, showed that touch applied in a systematic, aware way led to increases in weight gain and alertness for the premature babies, as well as a dramatic reduction of days in the hospital (www6.miami.edu/touch-research). After the success of this study, Dr. Field received funding for many other studies on touch involving different conditions and populations, eventually leading to the establishment of TRI.

Today, research into massage therapy has grown considerably, and includes studies being conducted by the U. S. National Institutes of Health (nccam.nih.gov), and the Massage Therapy Foundation (massagetherapyfoundation.org).

While there are some challenges that massage presents to the standard scientific method of controlled, double-blind study, researchers are beginning to design new paradigms that broaden the parameters. An informative article on new research methods can be found in "Methodological issues in the scientific investigation of massage and bodywork therapy" by Claire M. Cassidy in the January 2003 issue of the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies.

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