The Effect of Using Massage Chair with Acupoint and Meridian Muscle Massage Program on Back Pain: A Single Arm Pre-post Comparison Study

Objectives : The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of acupoint and meridian muscle massage given by automatic massage chair.Methods : We recruited 30 patients with back pain who met inclusion criteria.Two weeks were given as a waiting period, and the massage intervention was applied 12 times for 4 weeks.The programmed automatic massage chair was used to provide effective stimulus on acupoints and meridians for 20 minutes.We used Visual analog scale(VAS) and Korean Oswestry Disability Index(KODI) to quantify pain and function.We also recorded patients` all of vital signs and abnormal reactions during the trial to asses to assess safety.Results : Two participants dropped out due to personal reasons and 28 participants completed the clinical trial.We found that the degree of back pain (VAS, KODI) decreased significantly after the trial.As a result, VAS score decreased from 6.44±0.85(Visit2) to 4.59±1.52(Visit 14)(p＜0.001),and KODI score was also reduced from 14.79±5.13(Visit14) to 9.04±4.52(Visit 2) (p＜0.001).Also, we did not find any adverse effects in this study.Conclusions : We found that the acupoint and meridian muscle massage can effectively decrease back pain.This proves that the massage program designed by Korean medicine can be a good option to patients with back pain.However, further study with controlled design is still needed to verify its effectiveness.