New Delhi: "No high-certainty evidence" that massage is effective in treating pain, despite "hundreds of clinical trials and dozens of previous scientific reviews on the topic", researchers said in a study.
According to the findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, reviews providing moderate- or high-certainty evidence that massage was superior to other pain therapies, such as opioids, were rare.
Massage therapy involves using hands to manipulate the soft tissues of skin, muscles and ligaments for treating pain, and is usually delivered by certified therapists.
Despite massage therapy's popularity and long history in practice, evidence regarding its benefits remain limited, according to the researchers, including those from the University of California, US.
Analysing 129 reviews published since 2018, they found that of these, only 41 used a formal method to rate the strength of evidence used to show that massage therapy helped relieve painful health conditions in adults.
Of the 41, the authors focused on 17 relating to 13 different health conditions, such as back pain and cancer-related pain. "Across these reviews, no conclusions were rated as high certainty of evidence," the authors wrote in the study.
While the evidence presented in seven of the 17 reviews were rated as "moderate-certainty," others were rated as "low- or very low-certainty," according to the study.
Evidence of moderate certainty came from reviews showing massage therapy to have "beneficial associations with pain," the authors said. "More high-quality randomised clinical trials are needed to provide a stronger evidence base to assess the effect of massage therapy on pain," they wrote.
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