Is Massage Therapy the Best Treatment for Back Pain?

A recent study suggests that relieving back pain might be better accomplished through massage than such traditional formats of bed rest, medicine, and exercise. Although massage is a short-term relief, it may serve well until back pain can be alleviated by other means.

The research that brought the conclusions was conducted on 400 patients with pain in their lower back. Most of the test subjects were female Caucasians who were middle aged. Some of the subjects were given traditional medicines for their condition along with physical therapy, while the others received only massage therapy. Those receiving structural and relaxation massage were more active and consistently better able to perform job duties than those who were treated with drugs.

Three Test Groups

There were actually three groups of patients in the study. Two groups received massage, one the relaxation type and the other the structural type. Those receiving the massage had therapy for one hour each week for ten weeks. After the test period, more than a third of the test subjects who received massage therapy reported their pain was gone completely or better than before the test took place. Only 25 of the patients given traditional care reported an improvement in their condition.

Another key that massage was a better treatment was exemplified by the fact that those patients were twice as likely to:

* use less pain medication
* have spent less time in bed rest
* have taken part in more activities than the other test group

Patients after the Tests

The benefits achieved from massage lasted for some time after the 10-week test period. For as long as six months after the study, patients continued to have better functionality. However, this did not hold true one year after the study, indicating that massage therapy is more of a treatment than a cure.

There was no noticeable difference between relaxation and structural massage as in pain relief. This fact is puzzling to some who support the structural massage because it pinpoints the areas of ligaments and muscles where the pain originates, while relaxation massage is a much more general technique.

In Conclusion

Although the general feeling by those responsible for the study is that massage therapy appears to be the better choice for short-term back pain, the results are not conclusive enough to convince everyone. It is difficult to measure actual improvement when findings are based solely on the opinions of the test subjects. Recommendations are to give massage a try and see if it is effective for relieving your back pain and if so, a regular massage routine may prove to be beneficial for you.