Rheumatoid Arthritis: The Benefits of Massage

1- RA is an autoimmune disease. You're not going to cure it with massage. What you can do is prolong the activity, or the movement, flexibility of the joint. You can slow down the progression of RA. What happens with rheumatoid arthritis is the joint becomes compromised. The stronger muscle gets leverage, it pulls as hard as it canpull and the other muscle on the other side of thatfinger is being stretched beyond what its limitations should be. So you get pain involved on both sides. So with massage, what we do is we come in and we relax that musclethat's contracting and we reestablishproper length if we can. Rheumatoid arthritis usuallystarts in the hands or feet, but I guarantee you they'vegot stress all the way up their arm and into theirshoulder and their neck. They've got stress in their back. And the reason they've got this pain is because they'rebasically trying to keep this disease from taking overand the pain from taking over. The other part of this that's very key, and is really just as important as finding a good massagetherapist, is finding one that can teach self-massage,so that you remain functional and can stay as active aspossible for as long as possible. What the client should expect is that we're going to lessen the pain, we're going to reduce their stress, we're going to reestablish some mobility in the early stages. Youcan keep the fluid moving, you can keep the jointmoving, and keep blood moving to the area, you can stave offthe progress of the disease.