Directions and Dilemmas in Massage Therapy Research: A Workshop Report from the 2009 North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Massage therapy (MT) is widely used and expanding rapidly, but systematic research on its mechanisms and effects has, in contrast with many other therapeutic fields, a short history. PURPOSE: To take stock of the current state of MT research and to explore approaches, directions, and strategies with the potential to make the next two decades of MT research optimally productive. SETTING: The 2009 North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. METHOD: Using a modified Delphi method, the study authors led an interactive workshop that aimed to identify established MT research findings, needed MT research, weaknesses and limitations in currently available MT research, and directions to pursue in the next two decades of MT research. PARTICIPANTS: The thirty-seven conference attendees-including MT researchers, educators, and practitioners, and other health care practitioners who already work interprofessionally with MT-actively participated in the workshop and ensured that a diversity of perspectives were represented. RESULTS: The MT field has made rapid and laudable progress in its short history, but at the same time this short history is probably the main reason for most of the current shortcomings in MT research. Drawing on a diversity of backgrounds, workshop participants identified many opportunities and strategies for future research. CONCLUSION: Though lost time can never be recovered, the field's late start in research should not be allowed to be a demoralizing handicap to progress. Modern scientific methods and technologies, applied to the range of directions and dilemmas highlighted in this report, can lead to impressive progress in the next twenty years of MT research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".