It was always thought that massage worked its miracles through increasing the circulation. The logic was that the cells would have more oxygen and nutrients and would be able to dispel wastes and carbon dioxide. In a better environment the cells could perform better at maintaining themselves and their matrix. It sounds good but it’s mostly wrong. Massage only increases circulation for a few hours at best. So why do we see increased rates of healing for days after a single massage? It all comes down to the cytoskeleton, the header image in this essay.

The cytoskeleton is an organelle of protein filaments and tubes which give the cell its structural integrity and serves as an intracellular transport network. In this gorgeous three minute short  on the inner life of a cell, the cytoskeleton is seen as a grid like structure where filaments and tubules can be made or destroyed at will by enzymes. Make sure your sound is on.

It also shows organelles moving along the cytoskeleton. Among these are mitochondria slinking off to the right a little like an inch worm. Dynamin molecules are also seen pulling a vesical behind them much as a tug would tow a barge. At the end of the short, the white blood cell reorients its cytoskeleton so that it can squeeze through the seams in the capillary wall to enter the body spaces (presumably to fight an infection.) The grid like pattern of the cytoskeleton is what we find in healthy cells. This makes for a very efficient transport network so the cell can move its resources and energy production organelles to where it needs it the most to do its job. This is a cell with maximum productivity and minimum energy cost. However, not all cells are like this. Cells in distress and cells at injury sites are often found with a chaotic cytoskeleton that looks more like a Jackson Pollock.

Just try getting any work done in there! A cell like this will have a hard time moving its organelles and materials around internally to do its job. Basically it will require more energy to do less. Since the cells regenerate themselves and their surrounding tissues this is bad news for healing. This is why a diabetic patient might get decubitus ulcers. Your skin is constantly breaking down but if the rate or regeneration matches the rate of degeneration the outer cells fall off and are replaced by inner cells with no appreciable change in appearance or integrity. But if the rate of degeneration exceeds the rate of regeneration eventually the patient gets a hole in their body. By applying gentle friction around the margins of such a lesion the skin grows faster and closes the wound. How?

The cells do not just sit in the matrix of the tissues. The fibers of the matrix link across the cell membrane to the filaments of the cytoskeleton. When you tug on any tissue of the body, the movement goes all the way down to the cellular level. Before and after micrographs of cells that have had friction applied to them show that the cells somehow use the energy of the massage to reorient their cytoskeleton into a more efficient grid-like pattern. With a more efficient infrastructure the cell can now do more with less for days to come, increasing the regenerative abilities of the body to the point where it can catch up to and overtake the degeneration until the wound is healed. The heavier strokes of a massage alter the client’s cells by the billions. The body is already self-repairing. Massage simply increases the regenerative abilities of the body from the cellular level up. Healthier cells do more for you, no matter what stage your own health is in.

For those of you who want to read more on the cellular effects of massage you can read some extremely thorough research papers on the topic here and here.

As the tissue matrix tugs on the cytoskeleton, so the cytoskeleton tugs on the structures within the nucleus, including the chromosomes.  It is possible that massage alters genetic expression itself, but at this time I have not found anything in the literature. If anyone has, please let me know.

We appear to be the same from day to day and month to month, but that is an illusion. Every second you are losing two million red blood cells. Every hour forty thousand skin cells fall off of you. Half the dust in your apartment is yourself. However, you are also replacing those cells, and billions of others. For every cell you lose, a new one takes its place. So every day you do pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. Different parts of your body replace at different rates. Your skin is completely replaced every month; your skeleton about every two years. The body is a marvelously self-repairing and self-regenerating machine. All of this takes energy and resources. Before the age of about forty you have resources to spare and the regeneration can keep ahead of the degeneration. The reliable and unchanging nature of the body gives one the feeling of immortality during this period. Eventually though the ability to regenerate falls behind the wear and tear, and that’s how we age.

What to do? One strategy is to decrease the wear and tear as much as possible by doing what everybody knows you are supposed to do and about one in four actually does – avoid junk food, soft drinks, chain restaurants, smoking and drinking too much. Do exercise regularly and get out into nature. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t require a Dr. Oz diet. It does require moderation and persistence, which I guess only one out of four people have. All of these things will slow down the degeneration of the body as much as possible.

But what about the regenerative side of the equation? Is there anything you can do to increase your regenerative capabilities? Yes you can. Getting eight hours of sleep a day is a good start. Most of the rebuilding we do happens in sleep. Another useful thing is to reduce stress. When a person is stressed out much of our resources that should be going into regeneration go into being stressed out instead. Stress and regeneration compete for body resources.

One of the biggest problems with stress is its interaction with the immune system. The immune system is very expensive to run too. It defends us from infections and orchestrates the inflammatory process whenever we are injured. When a person is stressed out on a regular basis the immune system gets cheated of resources and starts making immature white blood cells. These immature WBC’s end up causing excessive inflammation and interfere with the body’s ability to regenerate itself. Diabetes, arteriosclerosis, stroke and heart attack have all been linked to too much inflammation from an overworked underpaid immune system.

Massage to the rescue. The two main hormones that mediate inflammation are epinephrine (adrenalin) and cortisol. Many, many studies have shown that massage decreases the amount of these circulating stress hormones by 50%. It also lowers blood pressure and the heart rate. It stimulates the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that calms us down and should be running the body most of the time. These effects of massage are not permanent, but it is definitely a step toward reducing stress and putting more resources toward rebuilding the body then breaking it down. Massage on a regular basis helps the body to maintain itself.

Does regular massage increase the life span? Probably, but it would be difficult to prove. There is a large body of evidence that stress reduces the lifespan by exacerbating inflammation and making all those diseases mentioned earlier worse. That is well established. But stress also does something much more sinister – it damages the telomeres in your cells. The way you regenerate yourself is by mitosis – body cells divide to replace cells that are lost from wear and tear. So why don’t we live forever? The cells accumulate genetic damage over the years to the point where they can no longer divide. Your ability to replace lost cells is diminished and you eventually run out of cells. That’s how you get old. That’s how you die. Aren’t you glad you chose to read this essay?

One of the important parts of a chromosome is the telomere at the tip. It is responsible for orderly cell division. The telomeres get frayed at the edges and eventually don’t work anymore. While that doesn’t kill the cell the cell can’t divide anymore so other cells have to pick up the slack, wearing them out faster. Stress is known to cause degradation of the telomeres. It accelerates the aging process! However, there is an enzyme called telomerase that can repair the telomeres and give new life to an ailing cell. So the formula would be get regular massage – rebuild your telomeres – your cells divide for longer and you live longer and healthier.

Designing a research project to prove this would be difficult. You could take 1000 stressed out people and give 500 of them massages once a week for life and follow them throughout life and see who dies first. That would be an expensive study but if there are any researchers out there reading this I volunteer to be a subject getting a massage once a week – for the advancement of science of course. A faster way to go would be to use rats. They don’t live as long and you could control things more easily. Take 1000 healthy rats of the same age and stress them all out evenly, say force them to watch three hours of Fox “News” every day. Then measure their stress hormones to see if Fox is doing its job. Half of these rats also get massage a few times a week, so you would need “rat massagers” (I’m sure there is a workshop on this somewhere). Then you could follow their stress hormones. Measuring the effects on the telomeres directly would be difficult to do but you could measure it indirectly by their lifespan. I would wager the massaged rats would live longer and that would prove the theory.

Now you may say that the rats might not be stressed out by Fox. Maybe some rats are jerks and they’d actually like it. That is certainly true for adults. Some people watch it on purpose. In that case we could administer mild shocks to supply the stress.

Joking aside, rich people live longer than poor people, partly because they can afford better health care, but partially because they can afford to take better care of themselves. For example, they can afford massage once a week. If you are one of my massage students reading this, you know plenty of therapists to trade with. Would you like to live longer and healthier? If the answer is yes, set up a trade.

Another major way that massage changes the body is to alter the cellular structure. That’s in the next post.