The word 'massage' generally conjures up images of soothing and relaxing gentle pampering, maybe by the beach, with a tall glass of chilled, rejuvenating lemonade by your side.

But did you know that massage therapy is a more serious science than just holiday relaxation? A treatment oriented massage, medical massage varies in type and provides fitness recovery solutions for injuries and muscle tempering. A massage that requires a referral from a doctor or a chiropractor, massage therapy calls for a high level of training. Let's understand the concept of medical massage therapy in detail, and see how you can benefit from it too.

What is medical massage therapy? It is a therapy in which a massage therapist uses a wide gamut of modalities and procedures to give a massage in order to sooth the painful area of the body. The massage therapist closely follows the doctor's prescription and works on all the touch receptors in your skin by restoring suppleness and rendering strength to your muscles. By alleviating stress and inflammation, the main aim of a massage therapy session is to improve blood circulation of the body.

Types of medical massage therapy. A session of medical massage therapy can be extremely therapeutic if done by a certified and knowledgeable therapist with the right technique. Popular types of medical massage therapy are trigger point therapy, stretching procedures, myofascial release, muscle testing, neuromuscular therapy and positional release. However, please note that it is different from ordinary relaxing massages as it is an amalgamation of art and science, which combines the intuitive and scientifically proven principles.

The practice of massage therapy. Medical massage therapists work in many settings such as nursing homes, spas, hospitals and sports and fitness centres. An authentic therapist will always ask the patient about his symptoms, medical history and desired results, before starting the session. Generally, the therapy is done when the patient is comfortably lying on a table, wearing loose-fitted or no clothes. Special massage oils and hand movements are performed in an hour long session to alleviate the pain from the body.

Benefits of medical massage therapy. Some of the main benefits of a medical massage therapy session are:

- Releasing the tight and sore muscles of the body by removing inflammation from the body.
- Working on the painful trigger points and working on the areas of high neurological activity.
- Helping release toxins, such as lactic acid that is produced by muscle tissue when one is exercising.
- Scientifically speaking, medical massages are also beneficial for the digestive system of the body.
- It also helps in calming the nervous system by working on better posture and coordination of body parts. And not to mention, massages are always overall relaxing.

Things to take care of when going for medical massage therapy. Here's a low-down of a few things you should keep in mind when going for medical massage therapy:

- Ensure that you do not skip any doctor or general medical care sessions because the medical massages make you feel better.
- Be sure of your therapist's credentials and authenticity. Ask about your therapist's experience, cost, on-job training and testimonials.
- Also, consult your doctor about your health condition, before paying a visit to a medical massage therapist.
- If your therapist is recommending herbs or other home remedies, always consult a doctor before trying them out. Massage therapists are not meant to prescribe any drugs or remedies as this is not part of their qualification or permitted practice.

Want to stave off bowel cancer? Make sure that your daily diet is packed with fruit and vegetables, recommends a new study. This is because researchers in South Korea say that a potent super-nutrient found in a range of everyday healthy foods can block the way cancer cells communicate and
instruct cells to grow and spread.

They have found that the flavonoid, called luteolin, found in foods such as celery, green pepper, thyme, chamomile tea, carrots, olive oil, peppermint, rosemary, navel oranges and oregano, can halt cancer spread, the 'Daily Express' said.

The findings show that luteolin inhibits the activity of cell signal pathways which lead to the growth of colon cancer cells. And, according to the researchers, this could pave the way for development of new treatments to tackle bowel cancer.

Luteolin has been shown in laboratory tests to have anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant and anti-cancer properties. Previous studies looking at the causes of cancer had failed to pick up the positive effect luteolin can give.

But, now researchers have discovered that the flavonoid is able to stop the colon cancer cells secreting a so-called pathway receptor.

Professor Jung Han Yoon Park, who led the study, said: "Blocking these pathways stops cancer cells from dividing and leads to cell death. Our study, showing that luteolin interferes with cell signalling in colon cancer cells, is a step forward in understanding how this flavonoid works."

Experts have welcomed the findings published in the 'BMC Gastroenterology' journal.

Dr Joanna Owens, science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "This study is a really early exploratory step towards finding chemicals that could be used to develop cancer-preventing drugs. Fruits and vegetables contain many compounds that could help protect against cancer." PTI MOT

A substantial number of lung and colorectal cancer patients continue to smoke after being diagnosed, a new study has revealed. When a patient receives a cancer diagnosis, the main focus is to treat the disease. But stopping smoking after a cancer diagnosis is also important because
continuing to smoke can negatively affect patients responses to treatments, their subsequent cancer risk, and, potentially, their survival.

A team led by Elyse R. Park, PhD, MPH, of the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, studied how many patients quit smoking around the time of a cancer diagnosis, and which smokers were most likely to quit.

The investigators determined smoking rates around the time of diagnosis and five months after diagnosis in 5,338 lung and colorectal cancer patients.

At diagnosis, 39 percent of lung cancer patients and 14 percent of colorectal cancer patients were smoking, five months later, 14 percent of lung cancer patients and 9 percent of colorectal cancer patients were still smoking.

These results indicate that a substantial minority of cancer patients continue to smoke after being diagnosed. Also, although lung cancer patients have higher rates of smoking at diagnosis and following diagnosis, colorectal cancer patients are less likely to quit smoking following diagnosis.

Factors and characteristics that predicted continued smoking differed by cancer type. Lung cancer patients who continued smoking tended to have Medicare or other public health insurance, have a lower body mass index, have low emotional support, not have received chemotherapy, not have had surgery, have had prior heart disease, and have smoked a high number of cigarettes per day at some point during their lives.

Colorectal cancer patients who continued to smoke tended to be male, have completed less education, be uninsured, not have had surgery, and have once smoked a high number of cigarettes per day.

"These findings can help cancer clinicians identify patients who are at risk for smoking and guide tobacco counseling treatment development for cancer patients," said Dr. Park.

An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

"Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred - whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics - is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

"We've come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures," Berns says. "We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain."

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to record the brain responses of 32 U.S. adults during key phases of an experiment. In the first phase, participants were shown statements ranging from the mundane, such as "You are a tea drinker," to hot-button issues such "You support gay marriage" and "You are Pro-Life." Each of the 62 statements had a contradictory pair, such as "You are Pro-Choice," and the participants had to choose one of each pair.

At the end of the experiment, participants were given the option of auctioning their personal statements: Disavowing their previous choices for actual money. The participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.

"We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements," Berns explains. "If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn't sacred."

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.

"Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says.

The experiment also found activation in the amygdala region, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe. "Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual," Berns says, "and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage."

The study is part of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, titled "The Biology of Cultural Conflict." Berns edited the special issue, which brings together a dozen articles on the culture of neuroscience, including differences in the neural processing of people on the opposing sides of conflict, from U.S. Democrats and Republicans to Arabs and Israelis.

"As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can't separate the two," Berns says. "We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that's putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage."

Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.

We inherit 40 percent of our lifetime intelligence while the environment we grow up in impacts the rest 60 percent, researchers say.

Scientists at University of Queensland, Australia studied a unique group of nearly 2000 unrelated people in Scotland who were tested for their intelligence, using the same test, at age 11 and again at age 65, 70 or 79 years.

Most people who began life with above average intelligence were above average when they were older, while others who had below average intelligence tended to stay below average, a website reported.

However, the researchers did notice that there were some whose intelligence improved and some whose got worse compared to others.

They also took genetic samples and quantified the role genes play in determining how much transformation there is in intelligence as we age.

"We estimate roughly a quarter to a third of that change is genetic," Professor Peter Visscher, lead author of the study said in a statement.

"Measuring detailed environmental factors over a person's entire life course is very difficult."

The study revealed that overall, environment contributes more than genes to determining intelligence, although, both play an important role.