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.
After all, there must be a good reason why massage has been used for thousands of years, with evidence it was employed to alleviate aches as long ago as 2700 BC by Chinese doctors.
Now a scientific study suggests it really could be more than just a pleasurable experience, with massage actually helping damaged muscles regenerate.
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.
While neutrophils and cytokines are helpful as part of the immune response immediately following injury, if they hang around too long they actually prohibit healing, the researchers suggest.
‘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.
There must be a good reason why massage has been used for thousands of years, with evidence it was employed to alleviate aches as long ago as 2700 BC by
