The Power of Self-Massage to Relieve Your Pain
Part 2: Tiffany Field and the 7 Secrets of Massage
Touch is a natural reflex to pain. Accidentally bang your head or stub your toe and you’ll instinctively touch and then gently massage the hurt. Tiffany Field, founder of the Touch Research Institute at the Miami School of Medicine, didn’t bother to test the efficacy of touch in these situations. She wanted to see if touch could rub out more pernicious chronic pain. She conducted a series of studies to see if human touch could mitigate the kinds of suffering that caused MDs to whip out their prescription pads.
Here’s what she found:
Secret #2
Massage reduces:
Chronic lower back pain
Back pain in general
Pain from burn injuries
Pain associated with multiple sclerosis
Pain suffered by pregnant women including lower leg, back, and labor pains
Hand pain
Pain in the neck from arthritis
Pain in the knees from osteoarthritis
Pain in the knees from rheumatoid arthritis
Joint pain of all kinds particularly in the knees, shoulders, and neck
Pain syndromes like fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic lower back pain
Pain from migraines
There wasn’t a single source of physical pain that Field and her team at TRI studied that was not eased by human touch. You have to admit, it’s quite an impressive collection of pain relief from a single source, especially one so close at hand. Still, and despite the evidence, most people, even you, are unaware of the power your hands possess to relieve physical pain.
What about Psychological Pain?
What, if anything, do you think touch can do to mitigate mental pain? This is the kind of distress that everyone occasionally suffers from; even you might find yourself anxious or depressed.
Field and her colleagues at the Touch Research Institute investigated these kinds of human miseries as well. Here’s what they found:
Secret #3
Massage relieves pain from:
Pre-natal depression
Post-partum depression
Perinatal depression
Depression during labor
Comorbid depression
Depressed mothers and infants
Depression and anxiety among pregnant women
Partners who are anxious and depressed during pregnancy
Depression in university students
People suffering from anxiety
People feeling stress
Sufferers of mental anguish
The heartbreak of romantic love
Pain from divorce
Breakup distress and the loss of intimacy
Intrusive thoughts a primary variable in breakup distress
Sufferers of bereavement
Depression in people suffering from chronic fatigue immunodeficiency syndrome
Anxiety in child and adolescent psychiatric patients
It’s not a secret that Field could have found many more types of pain that massage mitigates if she had more money. Science is expensive. Unless you’re a big drug company that expects to make millions of dollars from your monopoly protected discoveries, you’ll have a hard time funding research.
Moderate Pressure
In the course of her studies, Field discovered it’s not just any type of touch that relieves pain and improves health. It has to be the right kind of touch.
Secret #4
A Light Touch Doesn’t Work
Field’s research at TRI showed a significant difference between moderate and light pressure massage. In study after study, she discovered that it is moderate not light pressure that significantly improves health and reduces pain. If you’re performing massage on yourself the way to distinguish between the two is that one moves your skin, the other doesn’t.
Why is that important?
It’s not really the movement of skin that matters. It’s compressing your outer layer enough to activate the pressure receptors under it to send a message to the brain to relax your body and turn on your immune system. When you move your hand over your body with moderate pressure your skin naturally moves. Feeling your skin move under your hand is key. It tells you that you’ve applied enough pressure to improve your health and mood. Most importantly it effects your ability to relieve pain.
Note: This is the 2nd of a 4 part series: Tiffany Field and the 7 Secrets of Massage