An ongoing challenge for rehabilitation is to find new ways to enhance quality of life for people with spinal cord injury (SCI).This article critically reviews evidence of the efficacy of massage therapy (MT) as an innovative treatment option to improve secondary conditions such as pain, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and fatigue and to enhance immunity, which may reduce rates of recurrent infection, in people with chronic SCI.It summarises difficulties in the design of previous MT research, details current research concerning the effect of MT in secondary conditions of SCI, and offers a framework to integrate MT into rehabilitation practice as a nonpharmacological, noninvasive, and potentially cost-effective intervention.
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