Deans' stroke musings: Massage Helps Treat The Most Common Mental Health Problem

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Massage Helps Treat The Most Common Mental Health Problem - anxiety

With your doctor giving you nothing concrete about how you are going to 100% recover, s/he could at least address your anxiety by having Swedish massage done in the hospital. It would also help for that extra sensory stimulation needed to help your motor recovery.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2016/08/massage-treat-common-mental-health-problem.php

The latest research could be a step up in the evidence for massage therapy.

Just five sessions of Swedish massage is enough to improve the symptoms of anxiety, new research finds.
Levels of cortisol — known as the stress hormone — were also reduced.
People who took part in the study also saw reduced depression symptoms.
Swedish massage is the type of deep-tissue massage that people are most familiar with.
Professor Mark Hyman Rapaport, the study’s first author, said:

“These finding are significant and if replicated in a larger study will have important ramifications for patients and providers.”

The study was carried out on 47 people with generalised anxiety disorder or GAD.
People experiencing GAD find they are in near-constant anxiety.

With negative thoughts clouding their mind all day, it can be very hard to function normally.
GAD is typically treated with therapy and/or medication.
For the study itself, a group given Swedish massage was compared with another group in which people received light touch.
Both groups had the massage or light touch twice a week for six weeks.
Each therapy session lasted 45 minutes.
The researchers found that massage reduced anxiety, along with depression symptoms, in comparison to the light touch condition.

Better than relaxing?

One previous study has found that massage is no better than simply being in a relaxing room with soft, soothing music (Sherman et al., 2010).
Dr Karen J. Sherman, that study’s first author, said:

“We were surprised to find that the benefits of massage were no greater than those of the same number of sessions of ‘thermotherapy’ or listening to relaxing music.
This suggests that the benefits of massage may be due to a generalized relaxation response.”

So the latest research could be a step up in the evidence for massage therapy.
Other studies have linked massage therapy to better sleep and improvements in the immune system.
The new study was published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (Rapaport et al., 2016).