VIDEO: Finger Massage with Scissors

Watch how a guy gets his fingers massaged with scissors!

Everybody enjoys a good massage once in a while.

We spent a lot time at desks, on our computers, which is not extraordinarily good for our backs.

But have you ever felt the need for a finger massage?

According to Wikipedia, massage involves working and acting on the body with pressure. Techniques are commonly applied using hands, fingers, elbows, knees, forearm, feet, or a device. The purpose of massage is generally promoted as treatment for stress or pain.

In professional settings massage clients are treated while lying on a massage table, sitting in a massage chair, or lying on a mat on the floor, while in amateur settings a general purpose surface like a bed or floor is more common.

The main professionals that provide therapeutic massage are massage therapists, athletic trainers, physical therapists and practitioners of many traditional Chinese and other eastern medicines.

Massage practitioners work in a variety of medical settings and may travel to private residences or businesses. Contraindications to massage include deep vein thrombosis, bleeding disorders or taking blood thinners such as Warfarin, damaged blood vessels, weakened bones from cancer, osteoporosis, or fractures, bruising, and fever.

Peer-reviewed medical research has shown that the benefits of massage include pain relief, reduced trait anxiety and depression, and temporarily reduced blood pressure, heart rate, and state of anxiety. Additional testing has shown an immediate increase and expedited recovery periods for muscle performance.

Theories behind what massage might do include blocking nociception (gate control theory), activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which may stimulate the release of endorphins and serotonin, preventing fibrosis or scar tissue, increasing the flow of lymph, and improving sleep, but such effects are yet to be supported by well-designed clinical studies.

Massage is hindered from reaching the gold standard of scientific research, which includes placebo-controlled and double blind clinical trials. Developing a “sham” manual therapy for massage would be difficult since even light touch massage could not be assumed to be completely devoid of effects on the subject.

It would also be difficult to find a subject that would not notice that they were getting less of a massage, and it would be impossible to blind the therapist. Massage can employ randomized controlled trials, which are published in peer reviewed medical journals.

This type of study could increase the credibility of the profession because it displays that purported therapeutic effects are reproducible.

Proprioceptive studies are much more abundant than massage and proprioception combined, yet researchers are still trying to pinpoint the exact mechanisms and pathways involved to get a fuller understanding.

Proprioception may be very helpful in rehabilitation, though this is a fairly unknown characteristic of proprioception, and “current exercises aimed at ‘improving proprioception’ have not been demonstrated to achieve that goal”. Up until this point, very little has been studied looking into the effects of massage on proprioception.

Some researchers believe “documenting what happens under the skin, bioelectrically and biochemically, will be enabled by newer, non-invasive technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and continuous plasma sampling”.