Health Benefits of Massage

Can massage help your pain? Science suggests you could get some relief, which may be worth it. Here's what you should know about the health benefits of massage.

If you like massages, you know they can trigger relaxation, promote sleep, and help heal sore muscles. Although you may hear grander claims, the evidence to date is that, at best, you will get only short-term relief from pain. 

You can choose from many techniques. The most common one in the United States is called Swedish massage, but practitioners may also have training in sports massage, Shiatsu, and other approaches from around the world.

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The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) lists studies of benefits for low-back pain, neck and shoulder pain, knee osteoarthritis, headaches, and fibromyalgia.

The agency evaluated research on the benefits of massage for low-back pain and concluded that there is “weak evidence that it may be helpful.”

The NCCIH did conclude that you could get short-term relief for neck and shoulder pain if you have long and frequent sessions.

The evidence for knee pain and headaches was even less impressive, and there is mixed evidence that massage may help people with fibromyalgia.   

Beyond the agency’s list, there is some evidence that massage may reduce spasticity after a stroke and help mothers with pain from breastfeeding. It’s unclear whether massage can help pain and scarring after surgery or promote sleep for cancer survivors.

The prestigious Cochrane group has examined the evidence and found no strong reason to believe massage helps promote sleep in people with dementia, minimize swollen breasts in mothers, and other possible uses.

Fans of massage will say that it hasn’t been adequately studied. That’s true. When a California team including scientists from Veterans Affairs and the UCLA assessed the evidence, it found 32 reviews it considered “high-quality,” which evaluated underlying studies.

In general, the researchers couldn’t prove the case, but they did find “low strength of evidence of potential benefits of massage for labor, shoulder, neck, low back, cancer, arthritis, postoperative, delayed onset muscle soreness, and musculoskeletal pain.”

Let’s say you know massage is helpful for your sore muscles and are curious about why. One study found that massage boosts the growth of new mitochondria, which generate energy, in skeletal muscle.

During a tough workout, you purposely damage muscles so they’ll grow back stronger. But the damage triggers inflammation, which is linked to pain.  

In the study, researchers drew on data from 11 young men's quadriceps after strenuous muscle-damaging sessions on a stationary bike.

One of the men had one of his legs massaged. The researchers took cell samples from both legs before the massage, 10 minutes afterwards, and a third 2.5 hours later. The muscle cells from the massaged leg had more mitochondria and less inflammatory cytokines post massage.

“There's general agreement that massage feels good; now we have a scientific basis for the experience," said study coauthor Simon Melov, PhD, of the University of Southern California Buck Institute for Research on Agency.

The process may help explain why using a massage roller can give you short-term relief from pain after a marathon, another study suggested. But there are other relaxing, placebo-inducing effects from the touch of a human being.

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