Massage and the immune system
You know that massage makes you feel better, but does it actually make you feel better? Alongside clients reporting feeling more relaxed and help with muscle soreness, there is a growing body of evidence that massage can benefit your immune system.
Massage therapy can boost numbers of T-cells and as a therapy that has long been associated with health benefits it is reassuring to find evidence of the benefits. T cells are found in the blood and are one of the first lines of defence that form our immune system, important cells for keeping us healthy and fighting disease.
Despite this, massage remains a difficult modality to study in experimental terms due to the wide variety of massage techniques and the subjectivity of both the client and the therapist. The mechanism of massage is to stimulate the nervous system through the skin. This will then activate different pathways in the body and effect changes on both the physical and emotional state of the body. How this affects the immune system is unknown and the links between the emotional system and the immune system are a subject of interest to investigators.
Many benefits of massage are described – increased blood flow, improving circulation, reducing muscle soreness - and in the main part these are anecdotal, but it seems that in terms of boosting immune function massage therapy can play a part.