Can Massage Help with Fibromyalgia?

For most people, when their muscles are too tight, they stretch it. If the muscles feel stiff, they will move it around to loosen it up. If they are experiencing pain in the muscles, they will press on it to see if it gets better. Essentially, they have given themselves a massage.

Massage is a very safe and non-invasive treatment offering tremendous relief to many patients. Besides taking medication, I
found massage to be the most commonly used treatment for patients who are seeking relief from their pain.

Here is how massage works to reduce pain: Think about the last time you woke up in the middle of the night to use the washroom. Maybe it was  3:30 in the morning and your husband was sleeping. You didn’t want to wake him up, because you know he stayed up late last night, assembling the new clothes drawer you brought from Ikea. So you get off the bed slowly, and without turning on the light, you feel you way towards the washroom. Little did you know, he had set up a trap for you.

He figured, since he had to wake up early the next morning to drive your fifteen years old son to hockey practice anyways, he would just finish the drawer tomorrow morning before you woke up. So he put the pile of wood against the wall beside the washroom, setting up a collision course between you and your new drawer. And as you fumble along, in the dark, trying to get to the washroom *BANG* it happened; you hit your foot against the soon-to-be drawer.

Think about it, what would be the first thing you would do, (other than screaming out loud and cussing at your husband of course)? For most of you, you probably would jump around and move your feet rapidly, trying to “shake the pain off”. Then you would bend over or sit down and try rubbing the toes that hit the drawer. While all these are happening, you are probably clenching your teeth and shaking the rest of your body. You do all these, because it stopped you from feeling the pain at your feet and that is exactly how massage works.

Buried within your skin are sensors that tell you what is going on around you. These sensors are call receptors. The three most common receptors in your skin are mechanoreceptors, proprioceptors, and nociceptors.

The proprioceptors are location sensors that let your brain know the location of your body, so you would not lose your hand when it is behind your back. The mechanoreceptors are pressure sensors that tell you when there is something pressing on your skin and it allows you to determine what is touching your skin, be it a sharp pencil or a soft tissue paper.

Nociceptors, in this case, are the enemy. “Noci” is the Latin word for pain and nociceptors are basically pain sensors. These pain sensors are designed to alert your body when there is something wrong with it. In this case, there is something wrong with your feet because you have just banged it against a drawer and your nociceptors screams out at your brain and lets your brain know in no uncertain terms, “you are in pain!”

In other words, signals coming from your nociceptors are what cause pain and if you can somehow mask these signals, your pain
will diminish. The easiest way to do this is to distract your brain, by turning up the signals coming from your location sensors and
your pressure sensors. While you are shaking your feet, you are stimulating your proprioceptors. When you rub your fingers against the toes, your mechanoreceptors are firing. Essentially, you are drowning out the noises coming from your pain receptors.

This is the basis of massage therapy. When you are getting a massage, you are causing your locations sensors and pressure
sensors to stop your brain from paying attention to what the pain sensor is saying. Massage have been proven to help reduce pain
and should be utilized if your suffer from fibromyalgia. A trained and experienced massage therapist who is familiar with body structure and how the body moves and functions, will be able to stimulate your mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors in a very efficient way, causing greater relief.

Therefore, it is important to find someone that is experienced and component. http://www.amtamassage.org/ is the website
for the association of massage therapists of America. Go to the website to look for someone registered in your area.