Above: The famous Miraj Hammam Spa, operated by Surinder Kaur Bains, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
People
Massage Benefits Are More Than Skin Deep
by RONI CARYN RABIN
Does a good massage do more than just relax your muscles?
To find out, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles recruited 53 healthy adults and randomly assigned 29 of them to a 45-minute session of deep-tissue Swedish massage and the other 24 to a session of light massage.
All of the subjects were fitted with intravenous catheters so blood samples could be taken immediately before the massage and up to an hour afterward.
To their surprise, the researchers, sponsoredby the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health, found that a single session of massage caused biological changes.
Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in blood and saliva, and in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.
Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, than the Swedish massage group, and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin hormone, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol.
The study was published online in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
The lead author, Dr. Mark Hyman Rapaport, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai, said the findings were "very, very intriguing and very, very exciting - and I'm a skeptic."
[Courtesy: The New york Times]
Septembrer 24, 2010
Conversation about this article
1: Sangat Singh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), September 24, 2010, 8:15 PM.
A serious comment on massage perhaps might follow later on, but for the time being, something hilarious comes to mind. I remember as a kid that there used be some 'pehalwans' (wrestlers) who also did some part-time massaging to make a few bucks. Being pehalwans, they took everyone who wandered into the den for an oil massage, to be a potential wrestler. One day a Sardar ji happened to go for a massage and soon realized his mistake of walking into this moustached giant's den. At the end of the painful session, Sardar ji said to the masseur: "Pehalwan ji, do me a favour. I will sponsor a massage parlour for you in the town, if you promise to limit yourself to massaging my enemies. I will pay handsomely for your services."