MASSAGE THERAPISTS AND GROUNDING (EARTHING

Mind & Body | 2022 MASSAGE THERAPISTS & GROUNDING (EARTHING)

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

By Gaétan Chevalier, Sheila Patel, Lizabeth Weiss, Christopher Pruitt, Brook Henry, Deepak Chopra and Paul J. Mills.

It is well known that massage therapists routinely develop a number of health problems related to their profession.

Purpose: To determine the effects of grounding on massage therapists’ quality of life and pain. Grounding refers to being in direct body contact with the ground, such as walking barefoot on humid soil or on grass.

Setting: The Chopra Center for Well-Being in Carlsbad, California. Participants: Sixteen massage therapists (mean age 42.8 years).

Research design and intervention: A stepped wedge cluster design was incorporated into a 6-week double-blind Randomized Controlled Trial procedure with massage therapists assigned randomly into one of two cohorts.

Therapists were not grounded for the first week, were grounded while working on clients and at home while sleeping for the next four weeks, and then ungrounded for the last week.

Outcome measures: Prior to, during, and immediately following the intervention, participants completed standardized questionnaires reporting on pain, physical function, anxiety, depression, fatigue/tiredness, sleep disturbance and number of hours of sleep, number of clients worked on per working day, energy, and emotional and mental stress.

Results: As a group, therapists experienced significant increases in physical function and energy and significant decreases in fatigue, depressed mood, tiredness and pain while grounded as compared to not being grounded. At one-month following the study, physical function was also increased and depressed mood and fatigue were decreased.

Conclusions: We observed consistent beneficial effects of grounding in domains highly relevant to massage therapists, namely pain, physical function, and mood. These findings, combined with prior results from this trial indicating improvements in inflammatory biomarkers, blood viscosity and heart rate variability, suggest that grounding is beneficial to massage therapists in multiple domains relevant to their occupation, supporting overall health and quality of life.

Financial support and disclosures: This project was funded by Earth FX, Inc., and the grounding products were donated by www.earthing.com. Earth FX and earthing.com did not play any role in the study design, nor in the collection, analysis and the interpretation of the results and the writing of this manuscript.

Conflicts of interest: Paul J. Mills is director of research at the Chopra Foundation. Sheila Patel is employed by the Chopra Center and Lizabeth Weiss is an employee of the Chopra Foundation. Deepak Chopra is a co-founder and a co-owner of the Chopra Center. Gaétan Chevalier is a consultant for Earth FX.

Editor’s note: This is the abstract from a 2018 study in Scientific Research. See https://www.scirp.org/journal/ paperinformation.aspx?paperid=82706

HEALTH WELLNESS

D I R E C TO RY

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