You know that I'm a great believer in the healing power of tuina, the ancient Chinese medicine that uses massage to help the body to heal itself, but today I bring you news of a scientific study that shows just how effective tuina can be.

This study, which you can find in full here, http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6882-11-87.pdf looked into various treatments for the relief of chronic fatigue syndrome. 

CFS and alternative medical therapies

Chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS is a devastating ailment that can stop people's careers and put their entire lives on hold.  It robs people of the energy they need to live and to enjoy life and whilst conventional medicine has finally admitted that CFS exists, it is still not that good at diagnosing or treating it.

This peer reviewed study into the effectiveness of various treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome, compared the use of various complementary and alternative medical therapies, including tuina as well as conventional drug based treatments.  

Tuina proved to be as effective as conventional medicine

This study found that "qi gong (Chi Kung), massage and tuina were demonstrated to have positive effects."

One study "tested tuina and tai chi as compared to fluoxetine." The standard drug prescribed to treat and relieve the symptoms of CFS.  The study found that "the tuina group had more symptom reduction than the fluoxetine group, but there were no significant differences between tuina and tai chi or tai chi and fluoxetine after 1 month of treatment."

What this shows is that Tuina is at first more successful at treating CFS and after one month it is still as effective as drug therapy.  This study proves what I've known all along; that tuina is an effective, safe and non-invasive way of healing the body of several ailments.

I'm convinced that as more research is carried out in the West, or more of the research from China is translated, we will see yet more studies proving the efficacy of this traditional form of Chinese medicine