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massage reduced some of the negative effects of exercise including the delayed onset muscle soreness and the creatine kinase activity in blood. However, some of their results were inconsistent, which may relate to their not having waited the full two hours to provide the massage. Their study was also confounded by combining three separate techniques including warm-up, stretching, and massage. Although suggesting that massage may be helpful for sports recovery and healthy individuals, the data also suggested the need for more tightly controlled studies that investigate the various parameters such as the time after exercise that massage is provided. Clearly, this variable alone contributed to significant inconsistency in the literature. Other popularly posed questions, including the lasting effects of massage therapy following the termination of treatment, the contraindications for massage therapy, and the question of which techniques are the most effective, have not been addressed in the literature. Regarding the question of lasting effects, there is no reason to believe that massage effects would continue after the end of treatment anymore than drugs, diet, or exercise effects would be expected to persist. Contraindications such as varicose veins and cancer have been followed by massage therapists, although physician researchers in those areas refute the need for those contraindications. Clearly more research is needed on these questions. In summary, these questions highlight the need for further research. Some of these questions have not yet been addressed, and many conditions have not been studied in methodologically sound ways. Replications are needed for the methodologically sound studies, and more mechanism studies will hopefully be conducted as more sophisticated measurement technology is developed. In the interim, at least the existing literature that is wellcontrolled suggests that massage therapy may be a promising treatment. Aside from the need for additional research and replication studies, there will need to be a shift in the social-political attitude toward touch. Increasing numbers of schools are mandating that teachers not touch children even as early as the preschool stage. The incidence of child abuse and litigations against teachers has increased even with these mandates, and the incidence of sexual harassment cases against adults has also increased despite the disappearing use of touch in social communication. This may be an American phenomenon as social communication touch is still very present in European cultures like France and Italy, and touch therapies such as massage are one of the most popular forms of treatment in European countries to the extent that they are covered by insurance carriers. Similarly, physicians in Asian countries are heavily prescribing touch therapies, and, ironically, continuing to invite American "experts" to provide lectures and workshops in touch therapy techniques, such as infant massage. The physicians in Asia may be treating massage therapy as modern technology because they perhaps do not remember that the origins of touch therapies were in their own part of the world thousands of years ago. Touch therapies may have a greater chance than touch as social communication in the current U.S. climate as part of the healthy body trend along with diet and exercise. The increasing popular demand for alternative medicine may also help the return of massage therapy. In the interim, a larger body of methodologically sound research is needed to help inform this process.

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