For instance, Sun et al. While significant injuries in massage therapy are rare, cases that are diagnosed and reported in medical journals are probably greatly outnumbered by less dramatic examples. And minor side effects are downright common. The massages they were getting must have been quite gentle.
Benefits for musculoskeletal problems were not documented. You could probably do several studies of patients without encountering a single nasty situation. But what if you surveyed 1, patients?
Or 10,? Massage is not completely safe — what is? In my decade as a Registered Massage Therapist, 9 I met many patients who had been harmed by massage therapy one way or another — fortunately, mostly just expensive disappointments and minor backfires, but quite a few more serious cases too. My last massage therapist ruined me. I do not have a high pain tolerance. I begged her to be gentle, she ignored me, and I winced and sweated through the whole experience. I feel like it ruined me.
That was a year ago. I was gentle, and she was a regular client for the rest of my ten-year career. I have been paying attention to this topic for 25 years now. A painful, alarming sensory experience can actually dial up pain sensitivity — even long term. The experience of pain is affected by many factors, including emotional and psychological ones. People in chronic pain usually experience some degree of pain neurology dysfunction, and a breakdown of the relationship between how bad things feel and how much is really wrong.
That breakdown can be seriously worsened by threatening sensations. Thus, people experiencing pain system dysfunction can have minor and major setbacks in response to excessively painful massage. One of my readers suffered this kind of disaster. I may have been too aggressive with a few patients over the years. This failure was due entirely to my ignorance of pain science: despite being an unusually well educated massage therapist, I simply did not know that an intense massage could change pain sensitivity itself.
