Digital Object Identifier: 10.1188/02.CJON.52-54

Massage therapy is one of the oldest healthcare practices still in current use. Chi-nese medical texts refer to its use more than 4,000 years ago, and Hippocrates wrote about “rubbing, ” the ancient Greek term for massage (Greene, 2000). The foundation of contemporary massage therapy dates back to the mid-18th century. A Swede, Per Henrik Ling, developed it as a system of exercise that was both active and passive. With support from the Swedish government, Ling began to teach these methods at the Royal Central Gymnastic Institute, and these methods, known as “medical gymnastics ” and “Swed-ish movement cure, ” eventually became known as Swedish massage (Greene). Massage therapy was introduced to the United States in the mid-19th century by two New York physicians and was used by a large number of physicians from 1880 to 1910 (Greene, 2000). As technological ad-vances in health care occurred, use of thera-peutic massage declined and was essentially abandoned between 1930 and 1940. How-ever, in the 1970s, interest in massage resur-faced, and, today, massage therapy is one of the most widely accepted forms of comple-mentary therapies (Gecsedi & Decker, 2001)