Impact of Massage Therapy on Anxiety Levels in Patients Undergoing Radiation Therapy: Randomized Controlled Trial

Massage therapy for cancer palliation and supportive care: a systematic review of randomised clinical trials

“…The results are in agreement with the hypothesis that massage therapy is an effective adjunct to cancer palliation or supportive care. They seem to suggest that it can achieve reductions in pain [15,18,23,24], nausea [19,25], anxiety [17,21,23,25,26], depression [15,21,26], anger [21], stress [25,28], fatigue [25] and quality of life [15]. The only trials that failed to show significant inter-group differences were the one by Soden et al [22], which compared two different massage techniques, and the one by Paterson et al [16], which was a pilot study and reported only qualitative results.…”

“…There are major limitations in the evaluation of therapies for which patient-and/or therapist-blinding is difficult or impossible, particularly if the judgement about the effectiveness of that intervention depends on the knowledge or ability of the practitioner delivering the treatment. In this context, it is relevant to note that even those RCTs that include an attention control [17,19,23,27] or a sham intervention [15] do report encouraging findings.…”

“…The searches identified 14 RCTs [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Their key data are summarised in Table 2.…”

Methodological reflections on body–mind intervention studies with cancer patients

“…Studies indicate that various interventions such as massage, guided imagery and relaxation training, have beneficial effects on the well-being of hospitalized as well as ambulatory patients with cancer [28][29][30][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. In massages decreases in anxiety [37,38,41,42,50,[52][53][54][55], pain [22,26,34,35,38,39,43,44,46,47,[55][56][57], depression [41,42,45,50], anger [42,58], mood disturbance [28,29,35,37,53,[56][57][58]…”

“…Other studies found an improvement in quality of life and a reduction of pain, stress, anxiety, vomiting/nausea, and sleeping problems, fatigue as shown in reviews [33,34,[37][38][39]61] and studies [22,26,[28][29][30]34,35,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]63,66,70,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][83][84]…”