Effects of sexual abuse are lessened by massage therapy

Body-oriented therapy in sexual abuse recovery: A pilot-test comparison

“…The findings supported the study hypothesis, demonstrating significant positive change in psychological and physical well-being in the body-oriented therapy in contrast to the lack of significant positive change in the control group. The positive change in psychological symptoms is consistent with previous findings that demonstrated similar improvements in pre-post depression and anxiety in a randomized control trial of massage therapy for women sexual abuse survivors (Field et al, 1997). The qualitative findings indicated that the intervention powerfully affected sense of self and psychotherapeutic progress, providing support for the psychological improvements demonstrated in the quantitative results.…”

Integrating Complementary Therapies into Community Mental Health Practice: An Exploration

“…Although using a manipulative therapy for sex abuse survivors may seem counter-intuitive at first, the experience of the current authors is that, at the right time in the course of their treatment, many sexual abuse survivors can benefit a great deal from massage as a part of their healing process alongside psychotherapy. This observation is supported by findings by Field et al 8 in a study in which 20 sexually abused women were randomized to a Swedish massage group or a progressive relaxation group. Each group received twice-weekly sessions for 1 month.…”

Physiological Adjustments to Stress Measures Following Massage Therapy: A Review of the Literature

“…Given the breadth in descriptiveness of the techniques coupled with the subsequent variability of study results we chose to not provide comments on specific massage techniques. Study populations were varied and included sexually abused women ( 21 ), patients with eating disorders ( 22 , 23 ), pain conditions ( 24–26 ), hypertension ( 27 , 28 ), HIV positive diagnosis ( 29 ), cancer ( 30–32 ), post-operative patients ( 31 , 33 ), critical care patients ( 34 ), healthy adult populations ( 35–42 ) as well as specific disease states ( 43–45 ).…”

“…Thus, reductions in salivary cortisol may be short lived and multiple massage treatments do not appear to have a cumulative effect, although specific investigation into this has not been conducted. In the eight studies where salivary cortisol is assessed immediately pre-post the final massage improvement is less frequent with 63% of the studies now reporting a significant reduction ( 21 , 24 , 25 , 27 , 41 ). It is interesting that the one study that failed to find a reduction at the initial massage session reported a reduction at the final (eighth) session ( 21 ).…”