Hippocrates called massage "the art of rubbing"

and modern research strongly supports how therapeutic massage is.   Anyone else noticing a theme here?? LOL  
An article in LHJ 12/10 1/11 states that any type of massage may cause heart rate, blood pressure and stress horemones to decline, responses which have documented psoitive effects on our stress torn bodies.  Moderate pressure, which is what we happen to specialize in :], most effectively stimulates the body's pressure receptors.  Those, in turn, send signals to the body to relax states developmental psychologist Tiffany Field Ph.D.  and 20 minutes is all it takes to produce such healthy benefits.

What we know for sure, and science proves it:
Stress is linked to illnesses as diverse as depression and diabetes, reducing it is one of the healthiest things you can do states Brent Bauer, M.D.  He and his colleagues at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota recently reported that massage helped relieve anxiety, tensiion and pain in patients recovering from heart surgery.  Previous studies in related areas also showed that stressed out nurses, chronic headache suffereers, cancer patients, and athletes all benefitted from massage.

Even babies benefit:
Dr. Field also recently published a rewivew that found that underweight babies who recieve 10 to 15 minute sessions of massage several times a day gain 47% more weight on average than those who didn't.  Brazilian
researchers reported that underweight infants who had been massaged showed significantly higher mental develop scores at age 2 than other low-weight babies.