Chronic Back Pain Reduced Through Massages

Massages have been proven to be very effective when it comes to relieving chronic back pain

Up until now medication and exercises were the best two things for chronic back pains. Still, it seems that weekly massages also help a great deal when it comes to relieving the pain.

According to a new study, a 10-week period of massage therapy can help people improve their health and it can also relieve their back pains for more than 6 months. Given that most people go to doctors or alternative practitioners complaining about severe back pains, scientists decided to see what the best way to cope with the pain was. Although painkillers and exercises have proven effective throughout time, nothing works better than a massage per week during a 10-week period. Such a therapy guarantees patients that they will not feel any back pains for 6 months after the 10-week session.

Massages were thought to be effective for neck and back pains, but there was no evidence to show that they were really effective. The study made by researcher Daniel Cherkin, a senior investigator at the nonprofit Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, comes to support the theory that massages are the best way to go when it comes to chronic back pain. In order to see the effects that massages had on people suffering from sever back pains, the researchers initiated a study.

In the study there were involved around 400 people who suffered from chronic back pain with no apparent medical reason. One third of the people involved in the study were asked to take a structural massage every week, one third was asked to take the relaxation massage once a week and the remaining participants were asked to treat their back pains as they used to, through medication or exercises. The difference between a structural massage and a relaxation massage is that the structural one is used for releasing the pressure in certain joints and tissues, while the relaxation massage is used to relax the muscles. After 10 weeks of massage therapy, both groups reported feeling better than before.

After 6 months, those people who had not taken massages reported severe back pains more than the ones who had participated in the massage therapies. According to the researchers, both types of massages are good when it comes to relieving back pains. “The massage therapists assumed structural massage would prove more effective than relaxation massage,” said study researcher Karen J. Sherman, also a senior investigator at the institute. Thus, the researchers were a bit surprised when people in the relaxation massage group felt as good as the ones in the structural massage group.

The thing is that even though both types of massage are as effective as it gets, only structural massages are included in the health care plan. Thus, if you know you are experiencing chronic back pains, you should really consider getting off the meds and exercises and try going to a 10-week session of massages, because it seems that it has proven more effective than anything else up until now when it comes to these sorts of pains.11