Ravensara Travillian, Sylvia Burns, and Cynthia Price did a brown-bag lunch talk on massage research, “What Does Body Work Have to Do with It?: The role of touch therapies in health and healing,” at the University of Washington. Raven talked about the lack of randomized clinical trials (RCT) that demonstrate the efficacy of massage, but she cautioned us not to withhold treatment just because it hasn’t met the gold standard of an RCT. “Don’t deny a possibility to your patient,” she says, just because a trial hasn’t proven the efficacy of a treatment. Raven also talked about the problem of “external validity” in massage research – that is, the level of certainty that you can have about how actual clinical practice will match up with the way something was studied in a clinical trial. It seems to me that by its very nature clinical massage care will never line up in lock step with a procedure tested in a clinical trial, since virtually every practitioner has a unique education and their own way of doing things.
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