Study: Massage helps recovery at cellular level

September 23rd, 2008 By Cynthia Billhartz Gregorian

Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps got a massage twice a day in Beijing. His teammate, Dara Torres, had two massage therapists on stand-by. And a bunch of sedated rabbits in Ohio recently had massage performed on their legs after bouts of intense exercise.

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• GrayMouser - Sep 24, 2008
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  And what could they use, as a fake, for a double-blind test? Shiatsu?
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• Failon - Sep 24, 2008
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  GrayMouser- Shiatsu has too much in common with the myriad approaches to sports massage to be 'fake' and a useful counter in a double-blind study. Probably the most beneficial approach would be to vary the strokes performed in a very rigidly defined way and then compare physiological results.
  
  This has already been done in Europe, particularly in Russia/former USSR. Refer to "Therapeutic Massage: A Scientific Approach" and "Medical Massage" by R. Turchaninov, M.D. for a more thorough treatment of the studies performed.
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• GrayMouser - Sep 24, 2008
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  Failon- The whole idea behind double-blind is to remove the placebo effect AND the evaluators' biases. If you can't design a double-blind for this type of research you don't know whether data is any good, and even with a double-blind your experiment may be designed with a particular bias. This is assuming the researcher doesn't want a specific result in the first place.
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