How does massage therapy help in the healing of injuries?

Massage Therapy can help reduce pain and promote healing. If you have an serious injury, have been in a car accident, or experienced any physical trauma which could have caused serious damage, a massage therapist will require that you visit a doctor before they will schedule you for a massage. Massage therapists will not work with clients until 72 hours after the injury, possibly longer depending on the therapist's familiarity with that particular injury and their previous experience and any special training.

For muscular or joint pain, massage therapists can help by loosening muscle fibers, releasing muscles that are stuck together, called a contracture, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, mobilizing joints, suggesting stretches or performing assisted stretches, improving circulation which brings more of the necessary nutrients to the area for healing, and providing a nurturing touch.

Research has shown that massage therapy works on relieving pain by its antiinflammatory affect on tissues. Though this recently discovered process is little understood, it most likely works on limiting histamine release and that helps keep swelling to a minimun, and everyone is familiar with inflammation as being a source of pain in the body. Other processes that may contribute to pain reduction are the release of 'feel-good' hormones called endorphins, along with other hormones that releive the overall effects of stress, such as dopamine and seratonin. The physical or mechanical effects of massage help to improve local tissue circulation, but this effect is only active during the massage, and this helps reduce areas of congestion, called ischemia, which can be a source of pain because the cells are low on nutrients and have excess waste products. Once this is 'flushed' out, actually back into circulation, the body's normal waste managment systems do the rest.

That's why you are often told that drinking water is good for you. It's not like flushing a toilet where all the waste just goes away, think of it as moving the wastes into the blood and lymph where the body's elimination processes can get to work on it, and water is a good way to keep those systems working properly.

I say this because many massage therapists use that phrase and the wrong image that most people get is that the massage and water will make them pee out all their metabolic toxins, and it just doesn't work that way. Instead of a city dump where all things are thrown into a garbage pit all at once, think of your toxin processing and elimination system as being more like a converyor belt at a recycling plant where all the waste is moving all the time with a whole lot of good stuff that needs to be sorted through, and the odds and ends are picked out selectively, one at a time. And then, think of water as the oil that lubricates the engine and wheels that turn the conveyor belt. That's a more accurate picture of how it works.