A while back, Massage & Fitness Magazine analyzed some of the claims made in a recent article from Velo Magazine about massage and muscle recovery on cyclists. While digging through various studies, I found this one small study with half-marathon runners by Dr. Peter Tiidus et al. (1) where some runners who received a massage
A 2014 study published in Spine — led by Dr. Adriaan Louw from the International Spine and Pain Institute — showed that patients who received pain education with a physical therapist before they undergo lumbar radiculopathy surgery had better expectations and recovery than those who received no such education. Patients who
A 2015 Cochrane Review found “little confidence” in the effectiveness of massage therapy for chronic low back pain. While this had stirred some pushback from many massage therapists on social media, some therapists embraced the change of the narrative from “fixing” someone to “managing.” the condition. To sort through the
While many people seek massage therapy as a way to alleviate low back pain, researchers from the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto, Canada, concluded in a 2015 meta-analysis that they have “very little confidence that massage is an effective treatment for [low back pain].” Based on 25 randomized-controlled
Oregon-based Massage educator Whitney Lowe wrote on his blog that intervertebral discs can manage a high compressive load between the adjacent vertebrae. “The idea many people have when they hear about a ‘blown-out disc’ is that some acute force caused a previously normal disc to rapidly protrude to one side