Flick through any spa brochure or glossy magazine and you’ll find descriptions aplenty of the ‘healing’ properties of massage.
Go for one of these luxury treatments and you’re sure to feel better: more relaxed, perhaps in less pain.
Massage has been around for thousands of year. Evidence suggests that it was used to relieve aches by Chinese physicians in 2700 BC.
A scientific study has shown that massage can be much more than a relaxing experience. It actually helps to regenerate damaged muscles.
Flick through any spa brochure or glossy magazine and you’ll find descriptions aplenty of the ‘healing’ properties of massage. Go for one of these luxury treatments and you’re sure to feel better: more relaxed, perhaps in less pain
A study by Harvard University in the U.S., published in October, showed that ‘mechanotherapy’ (the use of mechanical means, such as massage, to treat an injury) enhances the process of muscle regeneration, apparently making damaged muscle heal faster and stronger, by pushing unhelpful molecules involved in the immune response out of the damaged tissue.
The scientists used a massage ‘gun’ — a robotic device that applies force through a soft silicone head — to treat the hind legs of mice given a myotoxin injection, a type of paralysing venom.
They found that applying force with the massage gun for 14 days helped clear neutrophils (white blood cells involved in cell repair) and reduced cytokines and chemokines (immune system proteins that help regulate inflammation) by ‘squeezing’ them out of the tissue. Without these inflammatory immune cells, the muscle fibres healed better than in mice that hadn’t been treated with massage.
Although neutrophils are important as part of an immune response following injury, too many cytokines could actually hinder healing.
‘The right amount of inflammation is good for you because it promotes muscle growth, but if there’s too much inflammation it can cause damage,’ says Dr Leon Creaney, a consultant in sport and exercise medicine at BMI The Alexandra Hospital in Cheshire.
Massage has been around for many years. Evidence suggests that it is used to relieve aches by Chinese physicians.
He says this study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, chimes with what sports medics and physiotherapists have long thought about massage — that it helps to disperse inflammation, which seems to improve pain and increase range of motion.
Also published in Science Translational Medicine in 2012, Dr Creaney notes that a study in which scientists examined biopsies from massaged muscles showed less inflammation than controls due to exercise-induced injury. Sam MacGregor, clinical lead physiotherapist at the University of Loughborough, adds: ‘This supports the idea that when you’ve got inflammation, if you give it a “flush” with a massage you can help get rid of a lot of the “bad stuff” — and it provides more insight into exactly how that works, which is reassuring.’
The latest scans show that the muscles can be scanned to reduce inflammation, which in turn helps with pain relief and speeds up tissue healing.
As Bo Ri Seo, a biomedical engineer and lead author of the new research, explains: ‘Lots of people have been trying to study the beneficial effects of massage and other mechanotherapies on the body, but up to this point it hadn’t been done in a systematic, reproducible way. We have shown that mechanical stimulation is linked to immune function. This has promise for regenerating a wide variety of tissues, including bone, tendon, hair and skin.’
However, it’s not time for every doctor’s surgery to get a massage bed and a dimmer switch just yet — for while studies such as this one are very promising, they are in no way definitive, says Dr Creaney.
‘This is a lab study done on cells in mice, and the applicability of laboratory work like this to frontline medicine is limited,’ he says. ‘Just because something works in the lab, that’s no guarantee that it translates all the way up to clinical practice in humans.
‘For example, we know massage is fine for muscle recovery from something such as delayed-onset muscle soreness caused by exercise, but we don’t tend to recommend it when someone has actually torn a muscle, as in that case physically agitating it can encourage it to bleed more.’
Sam MacGregor adds: ‘When we use massage, we’re trying to create the optimum conditions for healing and muscle repair. Is massage effective on its own without the need for rehabilitation or exercise? I would still question that.’
As a complementary therapy, though, massage is and will remain ‘an important tool’.
‘This study is promising, but even if we need more research into the mechanism of how massage helps healing, if it works, it works — and I see time and again in practice that it does work.’