Massage Therapy Journal Summer 2025

18 • Massage Therapy Journal

M assage therapy and physical pain are kind of besties—well, more like frenemies, maybe. We often think of them together and we get excited about massage therapy’s potential to address and lessen pain, but we forget that pain is just one of many experiences.

Destigmatizing “relaxation.” How many times have you heard the phrase, “Just relaxation massage” as though the “brand” of massage that delivers relaxation is less valuable or legitimate than other types of massage? As a profession, we have downplayed, undersold and essentially ignored the deeply important therapeutic significance of relaxation. There is a worthwhile body of research 2,3,4 that explores the experience of both patients and caregivers beyond the quantitative measures of pain and anxiety. Relaxation is key to those experiences. Well-being is another word that has essentially lost its meaning in modern language, but the authors of this article feel confident that massage therapists have the potential to profoundly impact well-being in the lives of people affected by serious illness. When we talk about quality of life, we’re talking about well-being. When we talk about having less pain, that’s also about well-being. When anxiety and depression feel less pressing, less heavy, less suffocating—these are all aspects of well-being, and they are not individual. They are all pieces of what make up any one human’s (and every human’s) experience. And they can all be facilitated by massage therapists with the right tools. Byron* believed entirely in his own agency and ability to control his fate—until he received a cancer diagnosis. In that moment, he felt as if his entire identity collapsed into one unwanted label: Cancer Patient. A lifelong entrepreneur, Byron suddenly felt that all his future projects became impossible in the face of this diagnosis. In his mind, his world shrank to the size of the errant cells Cancer: Massage + Cancer related Distress

When it comes to people with serious health conditions and the people who love them, pain might be a feature of their experience, but the benefits of massage therapy go far beyond addressing this single symptom. Let’s start by ensuring we’re using the same definition of massage therapy. We know this is a topic of significant debate, but for the purposes of this article, we will use the following definition: Massage therapy consists of the application of massage and non-hands-on components, including health promotion and education messages, for self-care and health maintenance; therapy, as well as outcomes, can be influenced by: therapeutic relationships and communication; the therapist’s education, skill level and experience; and the therapeutic setting. 1 Fully grasping the potential value of massage therapy , as defined above, for people affected by illness requires that we understand the deep truth that massage therapists are so much more than hands. Our words, our body language, our ability to notice and limit the impact of bias on our client interactions, and more make up this thing we call “therapeutic relationship,” which lies at the root of our ability to decrease anxiety, increase a sense of peace and facilitate an experience of transcendence. In this article, we’d like to invite you to consider the impact of those harder-to-express benefits that so many people enjoy from massage therapy but which get very little public appreciation and even less focus in research. Aspects like emotional well-being, decreased isolation and improved coping can be game changers for people living with serious health conditions.

Massage therapy consists of the application of massage and non-hands-on components, including health promotion and education messages, for self-care and health maintenance; therapy, as well as outcomes, can be influenced by: therapeutic relationships and communication; the therapist’s education, skill level, and experience; and the therapeutic setting.

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