Sep
5
2023
Massage can facilitate soft tissue expansion
Weicheng Gao, Shaolin Ma, Xianglin Dong, Tao Qin, Xing Qiao and Quan Fang
Medical Hypotheses
Volume 76, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 148-149
Soft tissue expansion is a helpful technique in reconstructive plastic surgery. Unfortunately, tissue expansion still needs to be improved. Tissue expansion is one of the most useful techniques in plastic surgery. However, it takes a long time to obtain it. Some investigators have reported several agents that speed up tissue expansion, but none of these agents has been used in routine clinical practice. Tissue expansion is a mechanical process that increases the surface area of local tissue available for reconstructive procedures. Living tissue responds to the application of mechanical force. Continual inflation of an expander increases the overlying tissue by inducing an increase in mitosis and stealing next tissue.
Various agents and topical creams have been found to enhance tissue expansion by different methods. After reviewing the article around the world, we haven’t found any paper that tell the correlation between massage and soft tissue expansion. In our current article we evaluated the effect of comfortable tissue expansion using topical massage application.
Massage is a comprehensive intervention involving a range of techniques to manipulate the soft tissues around the soft tissue expander. For patients who is experiencing soft tissue expansion with depression, anxiety, or other secondary problem, massage may be a useful adjuct to medical treatment. According to our clinical experience, not only massage is a relatively safe form of treatment with high levels of patient satisfaction for pain reduction and simultaneously, anxiety disappear evidently, but also can speed up tissue expansion.
The use of massage for pain and anxiety reduction and, warrants further research to investigate efficacy, effectiveness, mechanism of action, patients’ perceptions, and cost effectiveness for a variety of plastic and reconstructive conditions. Nurses, physical therapists, and massage therapists commonly practice a technique using hand strokes from the distal portion of the limb to the proximal in a circular pattern14; this helps to redirect fluid from one area of the body to another. Furthermore, effleurage, light manual rubbing, a classical type of massage, retrograde self-massage, and gentle, rhythmic stroking may result in a mild pressure gradient, assisting in removing edema from the affected part of the expanding soft tissue; these techniques may be administered by a properly trained therapist, nurse, or by the patient’s significant other following adequate instructions and proper demonstrations. In addition to the physiological benefits of expanding soft tissue massage by a significant other, patients experienced a range of emotional and mental benefits. Patients reported being comfortable and relaxed during massage, especially during the whole process. Bredin described the touch of a massage as a method of communication that expresses the other person’s willingness to tolerate and accept the woman after her disfiguring surgery.
Our experience shows that massage can improve the rate of tissue expansion by local massage application combined with eye ointment cream application. This means that application of topical massage combined with eye ointment cream to facilitate tissue expansion is simple and effective. In summarize, the effect of massage on soft tissue expansion is probably as follows: (1) reduce the pain in the period of inflation; (2) improve anxiety; (3) preventing or improving capsular contracture around the expander ; (4) increasing circulation or blood flow; (5) as a method of communication between plastic surgeon and the patients.
Sep
5
2023
This book combines All you need to know about: Muscle & Bone Palpation, Locating Trigger Points, and Stretching.
It shows assesment and treatment techniques, including stretching. Palpation of the bones, joints, ligaments and muscles. The muscle illustrations are great incorporating trigger points and referral points as well!
The book also contains 2 DVDs. The first DVD shows palpation on various muscles by Joe Muscolino.
Now, the second DVD is a special one, it contains presentations by some of the top names in massage therapy education, including Tom Myers, Leon Chaitow, Whitney Lowe, Ruth Werner, Benny Vaughn, Bob King, Gil Hedley, Sandy Fritz, Sandra Anderson, Judith DeLany, George Kousaleos, Diana Thompson, Monica Reno, Fiona Rattay, Susan Salvo, Tracy Walton, Bob McAtee, Mike Dixon, Beverly Giroud, Neal Delaporta.
Each of them has a take on a muscle, how they approach it and showing their favourite techniques. This is the most unique DVD presentation on massage I have ever seen. The author Joe Muscolino is to be congratulated for putting this wonderful book & DVD.
This book is available from: http://www.terrarosa.com.au/dvd/muscolino.htm
Sep
5
2023
For chronic headaches the best treatment may be one of the oldest: acupuncture.
In 1998, the National Institutes of Health accepted acupuncture as a useful alternative treatment for headaches, but warned that there were not enough clinical trials to draw firm conclusions about its efficacy. Now a systematic review of studies through 2007 concludes that acupuncture provides greater relief than either medication or a placebo.
The report, which appears in the December issue of Anesthesia and Analgesia, reviewed 25 randomized controlled trials in adults that lasted more than four weeks. In seven trials comparing acupuncture with medication, researchers found that 62 percent of 479 patients had significant response to acupuncture, and only 45 percent to medicine.
Fourteen of the studies, with a total of 961 patients, compared acupuncture with a placebo, a treatment in which patients were led to believe they were getting acupuncture. Of these, 53 percent found some pain relief with acupuncture, compared with 45 percent who felt better with the placebo. In four studies comparing acupuncture with massage, the massage worked better than acupuncture, but those studies were too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.
“People who get acupuncture prefer it to medication, because of the potential side effects of drugs,” said Dr. Tong J. Gan, a co-author of the review and a professor of anesthesiology at Duke. “This is an alternative treatment that is starting to move into the mainstream.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/health/research/16regi.html
Acupuncture for the Management of Chronic Headache: A Systematic Review (Anesthesia and Analgesia) http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org/cgi/content/abstract/107/6/2038
Sep
5
2023
The Father of Applied Kinesiology, George J. Goodheart, DC 1918 – 2008 died on March 5, 2008 at his home at the age of 90.
He was the Founder and Developer of Applied Kinesiology. Through his remarkable observation skills and analytical mind, Dr Goodheart found that normal and abnormal body function could be evaluated using muscle tests.
A 1939 graduate of National College of Chiropractic, Dr. Goodheart was in active practice for over 60 years in Detroit and Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He has authored numerous articles and books on Chiropractic Technique for greater than four decades. His distinguished career includes such highlights as Director of the National Chiropractic Mutual Insurance Company, Research Director for the ICAK-USA., and being the first doctor of chiropractic appointed to the U.S. Olympic Sports Medicine Committee for the 1980 Lake Placid Games.
A second generation Doctor of Chiropractic, nearly 40 years ago, he began to focus not just on skeletal structure but also on the hundreds of muscles that support the bones. He thinks of them as the body’s ambassadors — engaged in a constant, lively communication with the rest of the body. He developed a system, known as applied kinesiology, in which the muscles and surrounding nerves are manipulated not only to alleviate ordinary aches and pains but also to diagnose and treat organic diseases.
Linking muscle dysfunction to diseased organs is not entirely out of the mainstream. For years doctors measured thyroid function by testing how fast the tibial muscle jerks when the Achilles tendon is tapped. But for Goodheart, muscle testing is the diagnostic gold standard. He prods and palpates patients head to toe, searching for tiny tears where muscles attach to bone. These tears feel, he says, like “a bb under a strip of raw bacon.” When “directional pressure” is applied, the bb’s flatten, and slack muscles snap back, their strength restored.
And that, says Goodheart, may help strengthen a weakened organ. Goodheart believes that muscles and organs are linked by the same invisible neuropathways and meridian lines tweaked by acupuncturists. It took
Dr. Goodheart is listed as Innovators in Alternative Medicine by the Time magazine.
Sep
5
2023
Amputees can feel relief from phantom limb pain just by watching someone else performing “virtual” massage. The treatment appears to fool the brain that it is their missing hand being massaged, California researchers say.
New Scientist magazine reports that it harnesses nerve cells in the brain which become active when watching someone else carry out an action. UK experts said this kind of therapy may help amputees, as long as they can go along with the illusion. Mirror neurons in the brain fire up when a person performs an intentional action, such as waving, and also when they observe someone else performing the same action.
They are thought to help predict the intentions of others by simulating the action in the mind. Similar cells exist for touch, and become active both when a person is being touched and when they watch someone else being touched.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, say the reason people do not constantly feel what they observe happening to others is that a person’s sensory cells do not give the right signals, so they know it is not happening to them.
In the study, Vilayanur Ramachandran tested the therapy on ex-soldiers. His first test used a device called a mirror box, which he developed. An amputee puts their remaining limb, in this case their hand, in front of the mirror and their brain is tricked into thinking the mirror image is actually another working limb.
Two amputees had their normal hand touched while using the mirror box, and felt the sensation of being touched on their missing hand. In a second experiment, when amputees watched a volunteer’s hand being stroked, they also began to experience a stroking sensation arising from their missing limb. One even said their pain disappeared for between 10 and 15 minutes.
Dr Ramachandran suggested the amputees “felt” the actions of others because their missing limb provided no feedback to prevent their mirror neurons being stimulated, and therefore not telling them they were not “literally” being touched. “If an amputee experiences pain in their missing limb, they could watch a friend or partner rub their hand to get rid of it.” But Dr Ramachandran said there could be other uses for the therapy, including helping people who have had strokes. “If performed early enough, it may also be used to help stroke patients regain movements by watching others perform their lost actions.”
Kate McIver, of the Pain Research Institute at Liverpool University, said work done there on helping amputees create mental images of pain-free limbs – which operated on the same basic principle as the US research – had also proved effective. She said watching massage could help, but added: “With something external like this, the patient has to accept that the illusion is real for it to work.”
Journal ref: Medical Hypotheses, DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2008.01.008
