Massage Therapy Journal Fall 2025

Fall 2025 • 81

From Left: Adrienne Asta received the 2025 John Balletto Distinguished Service Award at IMTRC’s Opening Session; Brandi Higbee, LMT presented her poster, A Hypothesized Bio-Tensegral Model for Scar Tissue Observed in Anterior Cruciate Ligament Surgeries , at IMTRC 2025; Whole Health pioneer Dr. Tracy Gaudet presented IMTRC 2025’s opening Keynote Address entitled Whole Health: Body & Soul and the Role of Massage Therapy.

However, massage therapy as an applied discipline has additional barriers related to the research/practice gap, including the limited amount of practice-based evidence within the field (i.e., evidence derived from research conducted in actual massage therapy practice) and the extent to which evidence-based massage therapy practice (i.e., the practice of clinical decision making within therapeutic massage based on a dynamic balance of the best available evidence; patient/ client preferences, values, and beliefs; and clinician expertise and experience) is a given in the massage therapy field. These additional barriers are largely due to the fact that education, practice and research in massage therapy often operate independently or within separated or different environments, delivery systems or regulatory contexts, such as in academia or research medical centers/hospitals. Massage Therapy Research Gains Momentum Despite this historical research/practice gap, massage therapy research has come a long way in the past quarter century. The past 20–30 years has seen massage therapy and related research become more prominent in the research literature, studies designed and funded that are more reflective of and applicable to the massage therapy field, and work that, in some instances, is researched within real world massage therapy practice settings and by

professionals within or informed by the massage therapy field itself. Massage therapy research had a significant boost with the establishment of the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in 1999, which later changed its name to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) in 2014. 3 For example, when I went to massage school back in 2001, there were only a handful of small research studies related to massage therapy available to incorporate into my primary massage education. By the time I started my doctorate at the University of Kentucky in 2006, however, the scientific literature was expanding each year, with research of improving quality being published in more and more complementary and integrative medicine-focused scientific research journals. Momentum Builds: The International Massage Research Conference Comes to Life (IMTRC) About the same time, a reoccurring research conference intending to bridge the research/ practice gap within the massage therapy field was also established and led by an organization whose mission it was (and still is) to advance “the knowledge and practice of massage therapy by supporting scientific research, education and community service.” 4

BREADTH AND DEPTH

Get a feel for the wide ranging research that exists within the massage therapy profession by visiting the Research section of AMTA's website at amtamassage.org/ research.

amtamassage.org/mtj