Study: Massage helps recovery at cellular level

September 23, 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.



Content from McClatchy-Tribune Information Services expires 90 days after original publication date. For more information about McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, please visit www.mctdirect.com .

3.9 /5 (22 votes)  

Filter


Move the slider to adjust rank threshold, so that you can hide some of the comments.


Display comments: newest first

GrayMouser
Sep 24, 2008

Rank: 2 / 5 (1)
And what could they use, as a fake, for a double-blind test? Shiatsu?
Failon
Sep 24, 2008

Rank: 4 / 5 (1)
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.
GrayMouser
Sep 24, 2008

Rank: not rated yet
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.
Rank 3.9 /5 (22 votes)
Relevant PhysicsForums posts

More news stories

Complex wiring of the nervous system may rely on a just a handful of genes and proteins

Researchers at the Salk Institute have discovered a startling feature of early brain development that helps to explain how complex neuron wiring patterns are programmed using just a handful of critical genes. ...

Medicine & Health / Research

created 6 hours ago | popularity 4.9 / 5 (9) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Both maternal and paternal age linked to autism

Older maternal and paternal age are jointly associated with having a child with autism, according to a recently published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 11 hours ago | popularity 4 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

New understanding of DNA repair could eventually lead to cancer therapy

A research group in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta is hoping its latest discovery could one day be used to develop new therapies that target certain types of cancers.

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 10 hours ago | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Curry spice component may help slow prostate tumor growth

Curcumin, an active component of the Indian curry spice turmeric, may help slow down tumor growth in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a study from researchers ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 12 hours ago | popularity 4.4 / 5 (8) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Human cognitive performance suffers following natural disasters, researchers find

Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors - some serious - in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Fa ...

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 8 hours ago | popularity 4 / 5 (1) | comments 0


Google users warned of threat to smartphone wallets

Users of Google smartphone wallets were being warned on Friday that there is a way to crack pass codes intended to thwart thieves from going on illicit shopping sprees.

Anonymous knocks CIA website offline (Update)

The website of the Central Intelligence Agency was inaccessible on Friday after the hacker group Anonymous claimed to have knocked it offline.

New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission

Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. They’re a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel — such as an optical fiber o ...

The power of estrogen -- male snakes attract other males

A new study has shown that boosting the estrogen levels of male garter snakes causes them to secrete the same pheromones that females use to attract suitors, and turned the males into just about the sexiest ...

Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago

(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...

New power source discovered

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RMIT University have made a breakthrough in energy storage and power generation.