Part 4: Tiffany Field and the 7 Secrets of Massage

The Science

Secret #6

Most people think that massage only effects the area of the body being compressed. Tiffany Field and her team at the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine showed that’s wrong, dead wrong. The entire human being is touched by massage. It’s not just the skin or muscle being pressed it’s a chain reaction effecting the entire creature.

How can that be?

When your hands move your skin they start a profound change in the form of a chemical-electrical reaction. Compressed skin sends a physical message to thousands of pressure receptors under your skin. Those pressure receptors convert physical energy into a biochemical-electrical message that travels to your brain and tells it to chill.

That calming effect can be measured by changes to your body’s vital functions. Your blood pressure is reduced, your heart rate and breathing slow. Your stress hormone cortisol decreases and your immune system turns-on to protect you from disease. If you are the one giving and receiving the massage your mood will improve. If you were depressed you’ll be less so. If you were anxious or angry that too will subside.

But how does massage improve your health?

When your cardiovascular and respiratory systems slow, stress disappears and along with it the stress hormone cortisol. Reducing cortisol improves your health because cortisol suppresses your immune system making you more vulnerable to attack from disease. With cortisol levels diminished, your immune system kicks back in and starts producing white blood cells and NK cells. NK cells are the natural killer cells your body produces to kill threatening viruses, bacteria, and cancer cells.

The Stress Hormone

Cortisol is a paradoxical steroid produced in your adrenal cortex. Commonly referred to as the stress hormone, it can help keep you alive or kill you. When you’re stressed, cortisol production ramps up and shuts down your immune system to let your body deal with the direct cause of the stress. This fight or flight system, of which cortisol is an integral part, evolved millions of years ago to protect creatures who were in immanent danger of death from predation, which was daily but not continually. Today humans produce cortisol every time we’re stressed which is continually.

To get an idea of just how well cortisol disables your immune system, you should know how surgeons use it. When medical doctors transplant an organ they need to disable the recipient’s immune system so it doesn’t reject the new organ. They do it by injecting cortisol into the recipient. Few things shut down your immune system more effectively than cortisol.

Your Immune System

Secret #7

A strong immune system should significantly improve your health. TF and her team at TRI have repeatedly shown that massage activates the human immune system. That’s true even when the massage is given as few as 2 or 3 times a week during the TRI studies. A daily dose of massage ought to be even more effective at reducing illnesses and their severity. But because of the price of research there have been no studies performed to date to confirm one of the most inexpensive and effective ways to improve human health.

The Cost of Science

Large clinical studies cost money, lots of it, often millions of dollars. Almost all expensive healthcare studies are funded by interested parties, usually corporations who want a return on their investment. They want the research to show their drug or medical device will be profitable. The high cost of conducting these studies keeps healthcare studies that promise no corporate financial benefit from being conducted.

Everyone is an Experiment of One

Fortunately, you don’t need a large expensive clinical trial to learn whether massage improves your health. You can run the experiment on your own body and determine whether massage improves your long term health, wellness, and fitness. You can discover whether it improves your mood and makes you feel an immediate sense of well being. You can assess whether massage reduces your muscle pain and soreness and speeds recovery after a workout. You can determine whether massage strengthens your immune system and if a daily dose of massage saves you money on medical costs. Here’s how: just commit to a daily dose of self directed massage and discover how it makes you feel.

Note: This is the 4th of a 4 part series: Tiffany Field and the 7 Secrets of Massage