Low back pain is a huge health problem, and massage therapists claim to get good results when treating low-back pain. Indeed, low back treatments are the bread and butter of the profession. I guess that about 75% of massage purchases are for back pain. The amount of money that patients around the world spend on massage for back pain must be simply huge, certainly at least in the tens of millions annually and probably much more. As with chiropractic care, massage therapists might not have much of a business model if people didn’t have low back pain.
So it had better work!
And, fortunately, the evidence seems to suggest that it does. Over 20 years, an accumulation of scientific evidence has been adding up to a nice conclusion: that massage therapy probably does work for low back pain. That’s the finding of a comprehensive review of the science, from a 2008 review by Furlan et al.
Massage is beneficial for patients with subacute and chronic non-specific low-back pain in terms of improving symptoms and function … The beneficial effects of massage in patients with chronic LBP are long lasting (at least one year after end of sessions).
That glowing conclusion was based on just 13 trials (about 1600 participants), and the best of data of the lot is merely okay. But massage “wins” anyway. Massage mostly performed quite well in these tests. And, better yet, the results were also positive in the more rigourous tests.
The largest study of massage for low back pain ever done was published in 2011, and its very credible authors — medical back pain experts Daniel Cherkin and Richard Deyo, in particular — did conclude that “Massage therapy may be effective for treatment of chronic back pain, with benefits lasting at least 6 months,” but those results were uncertain due to a major flaw, and somewhat overstated. It seems to me that the results actually damn massage with faint praise. If massage is good for back pain, shouldn’t the results have been a more a bit more impressive? Despite its “positive” results, this study is a bit of a mood dampener.
So, is massage therapy for low back pain “proven” to be effective? Ha! Obviously not by a long shot. But the science is off to a good start — much better than most other popular low back pain therapies. It’s genuinely promising.
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada
No comments:
Post a Comment