Massage Therapy’s Effectiveness in Pain Relief Questioned

A recent study found no high-certainty evidence that massage therapy effectively treats pain, despite numerous clinical trials and reviews. Moderate-certainty evidence was scarce, and most reviews were rated as low- or very low-certainty. Researchers highlight the need for more high-quality randomised clinical trials to build a stronger evidence base.

Researchers from the University of California, US, have reported no high-certainty evidence that massage therapy is effective in treating pain, despite ‘hundreds of clinical trials and dozens of previous scientific reviews on the topic’. Their findings were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open.

The study notes that while massage therapy remains popular, reviews providing moderate or high-certainty evidence that it is superior to other pain therapies, such as opioids, are rare. The analysis covered 129 reviews published since 2018, of which only 41 used a formal method to rate the strength of evidence for massage therapy’s efficacy in relieving adult pain.

Of those 41 reviews, the study focused on 17 that related to 13 different health conditions, including back pain and cancer-related pain. None of the conclusions were rated as high certainty. Although seven reviews were rated as ‘moderate-certainty,’ the majority were deemed ‘low- or very low-certainty.’ The authors call for more high-quality randomised clinical trials to establish a stronger evidence base for massage therapy’s impact on pain relief.