A friend shared an experience with me. His stiff back had become worse recently. After sitting for a while at his desk, if he turned the wrong way when getting up or reached too far, ZAP! A pain would
shoot down his leg from the low back to the knee.
“It just takes my breath away,” he said. “It really gets my attention.”
This gentleman has played football, fought in the war, and built suburbs. If the pain is bad enough to rob his breath, I am on alert.
A few trips to the doctor and he was diagnosed with foramen stenosis, a term that means osteoarthritis – calcifications and inflammation – were taking up residence in the area where spinal nerves exit L4-L5. The osteoarthritis pushed against the nerve bundle as he tried to move. Hence the ZAP!
I inquired about the plan.
“Well, I went to p.t. and at first the stretches seemed to help, but then they made things worse. It’s not bad enough to operate on yet. I am just trying to move my back as little as possible.”
Good heavens. I had to speak.
“Have you considered doing some massage?”
“What good would massage do?”
Oh yes, sometimes this question comes up. I happily urge all massage therapists to answer it when it does.
Too often people think inflammation and calcifications of osteoarthritis are set in stone. They move less and less, giving the condition a wide-open opportunity to get much, much, worse.
Well, massage therapy alleviates back pain, inflammation and swelling. It is why we train to do what we do. I mentioned a recent study that found general, non-specific massage helped reduce stenosis pain.
He asked if massage could fix the problem.
The study didn’t go long enough to figure that out, I explained. The big result is that people felt better and thus did more and felt healthier.
Do massage therapists think gentle rubbing can reduce osteoarthritis? Or “just“relieve it? I think we know the answer, don’t we?
massage can definitely “fix” many problems in the short run, and some in the long run as well. that said, the type of massage varies depending on the issue one is trying to fix
I beg to differ – massage can’t “FIX” anything. What it CAN do is “create a window of opportunity for the body to “fix” itself”. In other words, if the person expects massage to be the only answer and doesn’t change anything else (ie posture, stress management strategies, or overuse patterns), it will only be short-term relief that will diminish in effectiveness over time. If instead the person takes the relief the session likely provides as a window of opportunity to more easily address whatever started/exacerbated the pain in the first place – long-term relief is much more likely to occur. And this is true even if the trouble being addressed is something like stenosis or arthritis. Sometimes they need further guidance with the necessary changes, sometimes they do not. Regardless though, I think it is an extremely important distinction that must be conveyed to massage therapists and clients alike. And I will admit it is my personal soapbox.
It is absolutely possible for an issue to be fixed regardless of lifestyle changes. You may have not had this experience but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I am immediately reminded of a client I had who came in initially complaining of long-standing hip pain and dysfunction. She’d tried numerous things-doctors, PT, chiropractic, massage- none of which really helped. One session of massage with me fixed it entirely. I can say this definitively because I continued to see her off and on for years, and she never complained of hip issues again. She was an office worker and would come in periodically with stereotypical neck, shoulder and wrist pain. She worked hours that were too long, didn’t take enough breaks and in my estimation probably didn’t take ergonomics seriously enough, so yes I couldn’t “fix” those issues, only temporarily relieve them. But the hip pain, I feel confident in saying was fixed. I was surprised as I hadn’t had advanced training in this area and performed what I would consider standard work in her glutes which I would guess resolved some trigger points and allowed her to move better, thus breaking the cycle of dysfunction.
I’ve had other surprising experiences like this, such as when I accidentally fixed a client’s headache while working on her sacrum.
So, I’ll get on my own personal soapbox of “bodies are amazing and mysterious and don’t always work any one particular way”. Any absolute statement about what’s possible is foolish.