• Clinical Relevance: While short-term benefits are promising, it’s unclear whether regular massage is needed to sustain hormonal changes. Maintenance protocols have not been defined nor are they being looked at. Many manual therapy research articles look at the short-term positive effects but few delve into the long-term effects. Those that do leave us wanting more as we are seeing little long-term research that stands up to scrutiny justifying the long-term biochemical changes from massage therapy.

Understanding suffering in the context of pain is a complex and nuanced endeavor. A recent paper offers a definition of pain-related suffering as “a profoundly negative, complex, and dynamic experience arising from a perceived threat to an individual’s sense of self and identity.” This definition underscores the depth and multifaceted nature of suffering, but it also raises important questions about the role of empirical definitions in our approach to pain management.