IJTMB: Vital Recognition of the Science behind Massage Therapy

Posted:Tuesday, January 23, 2018

By Massage Therapy Foundation President-Elect, Doug Nelson, LMT, BCTMB

One of the most important ways that MTF supports our profession is by establishing a forum where scientific research and case studies in massage therapy can be published. The creation of the International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (IJTMB) was an enormous accomplishment and one in which we can take great pride. We now have, like every other discipline, our own scientific journal! A primary goal in the creation of the journal was that it should be accessible.

Have you ever read an abstract of a research paper that you found interesting, and then discovered that if you wanted to read the whole paper, you could purchase it for a mere $37.50? That does not happen at IJTMB; our journal is open-access. Every article is free for everyone to read or download. This is vitally important to both readers and researchers. Many journals ask the reader to pay for access to full articles, and other journals ask the researcher to pay to publish in them. Through your donations, we have made the journal free and available to everyone.

Another critical feature of IJTMB is that it is PubMed indexed. If any health care provider or researcher is combing the literature to find out more about the possible benefits of massage therapy, a search on PubMed will take them to anything published in IJTMB. This is essential to disseminating research about massage therapy to people who may not have considered our field to have scientific underpinnings and investigation. That benefits all of us within the profession, as well as healthcare as a whole.