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PUBMED
www.pubmed.gov
PubMed is always a great place to begin your research. It provides access to citations from biomedical literature
and was developed at the National Library of Medicine. Much of PubMed’s content consists of information from
the Medline database, which contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 5,000 biomedical
journals published in the United States and 80 other countries; it contains more than 15 million citations,
many of which you can access for free. (See pages 100 and 105 for more information about how to find articles
for free and how to obtain them if there is a charge.)
To begin a search on PubMed, visit www.pubmed.gov. In the search box, type your terms—“back pain and massage.”
At the time of this writing, the search returned 195 articles on the topic. The first one on the article
list is, “Effectiveness of massage therapy for chronic, non-malignant pain: a review,” published in the June 4,
2007, issue of Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
This article states: “Existing research provides fairly robust support for the analgesic effects of massage for
non-specific low back pain.”
Sounds like an article you might want to read. It’s not only from an evidence-based journal, but it’s also free to
read in PubMed.
You may also look at the pre-formatted PubMed searches available on the Massage Therapy Foundation website
(www.massagetherapyfoundation.org/pubmedsearches.html).
Scrolling through the list, you’ll fi nd one on back pain and massage. Clicking on this link launches an automated search in PubMed on the
selected topic.
PubMed also has a separate subset for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy articles. You can limit your search results to
this subset of articles by clicking on the “Limit Link.” Within this screen, there is a section called “Subsets” where you can select
“Complementary.” Using this limit can help you isolate the articles about complementary and alternative medicine
for a specific condition or disease.
Massage Therapy Research Database
www.massagetherapyfoundation.org/researchdb.html
Another great resource is the Massage Therapy Research Database. This database, provided by the Massage
Therapy Foundation, contains more than 4,800 article citations. Beginning last year, additions to the
database are of non-Medline indexed journals only. This is due to a new feature on the site that allows you
to access live searches in PubMed. The following are some of the non-Medline indexed journals included
in these updates: mtj, Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies and the Journal of Soft Tissue
Manipulation.
A search of this research database for “back pain” and “massage” returned 83 article citations. (See the sidebar
on page 100 for ways of obtaining the actual articles.)
The Cochrane Library
www.cochrane.org
The Cochrane Library is recognized as the gold standard in evidence-based health care. It includes reliable
evidence from Cochrane and other systematic reviews, clinical trials, and more. Full reviews are only available
via subscription databases; however, the summaries are available for free on their site and often contain a good
bit of information.
When we searched for massage and back pain we found a review titled “Massage for Low-Back Pain” by
AD Furlan, et al.3 It states: “One of the oldest forms of health care now has Cochrane evidence of benefit. In
the newly updated Cochrane review of massage for low back pain, there is now some evidence to show overall
benefit. New, high-quality trials show that massage gives some relief from back pain that has continued for many
weeks or months—and the benefit may continue at least a year after the course of massage is over. There is still
not enough evidence about massage for acute back pain (back pain that started recently).” (See the sidebar on
page 100 for information on obtaining the complete Cochrane review.)
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American Massage Therapy Association®
