A new study shows that certain “doses” of massage therapy work better on neck pain.
Karen Sherman, senior scientific investigator at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, say that 60-minute sessions, two to three times per week, seem to reap the best rewards.
The results of her study appeared in a recent issue of the Annals of Family Medicine and state that massage therapy can relieve neck pain if it is done often, for the correct length of time, and performed by a professional massage therapist.
“In the short term, 60 minutes of massage is better than 30, and you want to do multiple treatments a week for the first four weeks,” she says.
Millions of Americans suffer from neck pain and such pain can manifest as a result of a variety of things, such as awkward sleeping positions, car accidents, or being hunched over a desk for hours at a time.
And unfortunately, some people don’t get any relief from anti-inflammatory medicines that doctors tend to prescribe. “People with back and neck pain aren’t usually satisfied with what they get from their doctor, so they are looking around for something that works,” Sherman explained.
Sherman performed her study to determine what dosage of massage therapy would yield the maximum results. She assigned 228 men and women, aged 20 to 64, randomly to one of several groups.
The groups consisted of participants receiving 30-minute massages two or three times weekly; one-hour massages one, two or three times weekly; and a comparison group of participants who did not receive any massage therapy.
Researchers found that participants getting one hour of massage three times a week showed the most reduction in pain.
“People getting massage three times a week were almost five times as likely to have a clinically meaningful (meaning important or noticeable) improvement in function and over twice as likely to report a clinically meaningful decrease in pain,” Sherman said, when compared to those who received no massage therapy at all.
Researcher and massage therapist, Jeanette Ezzo, who has conducted studies about the effectiveness of alternative therapies, says the study is, “an important contribution to understanding the massage dosage necessary to relieve neck pain.”
One word of caution: Do not use amateurs, such as relatives or partners, to perform these massages.
“We used extremely experienced massage therapists,” says Sherman. “Treatment sessions also assessed range of motion and looked at how the patient’s body compensated for the neck pain, which the average person is unable to do.”
According to other specialists, if massage is performed incorrectly, such as by an amateur, it can do more harm than good.