Growing public awareness of massage’s benefits for alleviating a number of health problems — from stress to arthritis pain — and greater availability of services have made massage therapy accessible and affordable to a much broader spectrum of consumers than ever before.

If you’re among the Americans whom the National Center for Health Statistics says spent $22 billion on visits to complementary and alternative medicine providers in 2007 (the latest year for which data are available), you’ll want to get the most benefit and the best value out of your massage therapy visit.

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How to choose massage that’s right for you

While massage can ease stress and tension and may have emotional benefits, the use of massage therapy in depressed patients is “controversial,” the investigators note, and “there is no qualitative review of the treatment effect of massage therapy in depressed patients.”

To investigate further, they searched for randomized controlled trials of massage therapy in depressed patients. They identified 17 studies including 786 people in all. In 13 of the trials, massage therapy was compared to another active treatment such as Chinese herbs, relaxation exercises, or rest, while four compared massage to a “no treatment” control group. Investigators also used a range of methods for evaluating mood and depression in study participants.

Overall, the studies, which were of “moderate” quality, showed that massage therapy had “potentially significant effects” in alleviating symptoms of depression, the researchers report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Researchers attribute this to several possible factors, including stress release brought about by massage, an “alliance” that forms between the patient and therapist, or possibly the release of the “trust hormone” oxytocin.

Source: Yahoo! News

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One of the biggest underlying factors of disease is stress, and it’s hard to find a greater stress breaker than massage. Massage can also lead to enhanced body awareness:

Body awareness is just what it sounds like, being aware of your body. Most of us walk around oblivious to the body we live in. We don’t pay attention to what we put in it or how we treat it. Getting massage forces us to pay more attention to ourselves. We become more aware of the aches and pains that we ignore. When you do one thing that is good for you it snowballs and you want to do more good things for yourself. Massage encourages to take better care of ourselves.

Get all the health benefits of massage with this great Fitness.com article.