Chatting with MTF President Jerrilyn Cambron about Systematic Reviews

What is a systematic review, and why is it worth it for the MTF to invest in one?

A review is a research article that compiles previous results into one big overview article. A systematic review is one of the strongest types of review articles because the researchers go to great lengths to describe to the reader how they searched for the articles (the search databases and the keywords they used to search), which types of articles were included or excluded, and also the quality of each article based on a scoring system. In massage therapy research review articles, one of the biggest challenges is deciding which types of “massage therapy” would be included in the review because so many types of treatment fit under this umbrella. Once that is decided, the search may still include hundreds of possible articles. We have asked the Samueli Institute (a prestigious group of researchers) to help with this process and with assessing the eligibility and quality of the articles.

MTs already know that massage helps with pain. Why do we need a systematic review to tell us that?

Great question! The results of this systematic review will help the massage therapy profession better understand where the majority of the data fall, meaning which populations/conditions were most studied and what needs further research. Sure we all “know” that massage helps pain, but we need to better understand what kind of pain are we talking about and for what conditions. We can then inform our clients and others about what the results say. For example, it would be great to be able to say that “massage therapy has been shown to be beneficial for chronic low back pain, and here are the results of a systematic review.” This carries great weight within other health care professions and with many of our clients. Also, researchers would like to know where there are data lacking so that they can focus on studies that fill in the gaps. A systematic review is a great way to step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of research evidence.

If the outcome is usually “more research needs to be conducted”, how can systematic reviews be useful?

Truthfully, almost all research says that “more research needs to be conducted” because we cannot ever stand on the results of just one study. In order to best understand the bigger picture, it is important to look at things from many different views. For example, if we were interested in massage therapy for sleep disorders, we might want to read a variety of studies that include different variables such as adults or children, rural or city living, studies that look at duration of sleep or quality of sleep, look at short-term effect or long-term effect, perhaps look at variable shift-workers or the more popular first-shift workers. It is not possible to study everything in one research study. However, once a variety of articles are written about a topic, we can compile the evidence into one article with an overview of findings, such as in a systematic review.

What might be good next steps after this systematic review is completed?

Hopefully the article can be used by practicing massage therapists for educational purposes and to better inform their clients and other health care professionals who are interested in massage therapy. These results might also be welcomed by condition-specific groups (such as the Arthritis Foundation) or population-specific groups (such as the Veterans Administration) who seek help for pain. And certainly the research community will welcome these results to help determine the research priorities based on the areas that lack evidence. Gathering these results is quite exciting and I look forward to reading the final report!