Does massage therapy actually lower cortisol level in our body? If you search on Google Scholar or PubMed, you might find numerous studies that say, “Yes!” However, if you dig a little deeper and examine the literature on a broader scale, it actually says, “Not really.”
On March 31, 2017, I attended the Registered Massage Therapists’ Association of British Columbia’s Mental Health Symposium where Dr. Christopher Moyer, who is a clinical psychologist, broke down the conflicting research about massage therapy’s effect on cortisol levels. One one hand, some research—primarily done at the Touch Research Institute (TRI) in Florida—found that a single dose or multiple doses of massage can reduce cortisol significantly1,2 while Moyer’s research and a few others outside of TRI found “very little, if at all.”3
Photo: Nick Ng
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