There's not a lot of solid evidence that massage helps with pain

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-07-16 01:00

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US scientists reviewed the existing evidence on whether massage therapy is a more effective treatment than other active therapies for treating pain. They found that, despite hundreds of clinical trials and dozens of previous scientific reviews on the topic, there's no high-certainty evidence that massage is an effective pain treatment. Assessing the strength of the evidence across 129 previous reviews, they found just 41 used a formal method to rate the strength of evidence. They focused in on 17 of these, covering 13 different health conditions, and say there were no conclusions rated as high certainty of evidence and just seven conclusions rated as moderate-certainty evidence. The rest of the conclusions were rated as low- or very low–certainty evidence. All the conclusions rated as moderate certainty were that massage therapy was linked with improvements in pain.

Media release

From: JAMA

Use of Massage Therapy for Pain

About The Study: This study found that despite a large number of randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews of massage therapy for painful adult health conditions rated a minority of conclusions as moderate-certainty evidence and that conclusions with moderate- or high-certainty evidence that massage therapy was superior to other active therapies were rare.

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Journal/
conference: JAMA Network Open

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Veterans Health Administration, USA

Funder: Funding was provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development.

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