Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/68009
FINDING RELEVANT RESEARCH This article— and the next —will put together the elements of massage research articles into bigger pictures, each element informing and influencing the others. Let's jump right in by working through a possible massage practice scenario to see how we might address it using the literature. If you have access to the Internet, follow along with the steps below. The scenario: An older client mentions that the pain from his arthritis is unmanageable using only over-the-counter medication. His doctor will write a prescription for stronger medicine, but the client wants to minimize his use of prescription medications. He asks you whether massage would help. Your experience involves using massage to treat chronic musculoskeletal pain, so you want to find out whether there is evidence that massage offers similar benefits for non-pharmacological treatment of arthritis pain. LOCATE FREE ARTICLES DEFINE THE SEARCH The first step is a literature search, where we'll look for any studies that address this question. Various databases are available to people with access to medical libraries, but many people do not have such access. To make this exercise as simple as possible, let's use a database available to everyone. PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed or www.pubmed.gov), hosted by the National Library of Medicine, is a taxpayer-funded website that allows you to search a catalog of medical and scientific research articles for free. Doing a search here provides much more reliable results than doing a general Internet search using an engine such as Google. In fact, PubMed serves as the basis for other online databases, such as the one hosted by the Massage Therapy Foundation. These searches will return links to articles and their abstracts; some articles are free, but others aren't, depending on the policies of the journals. Here, we'll use PubMed to search only for free articles. Decide on the search strategy. A common search structure in evidence-based medicine involves writing a PICO question, where PICO stands for: Patient, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome. Writing out our search as a PICO question might look something like this: In older adults with arthritis (patient), does massage therapy (intervention), when compared to pharmacological treatment (comparison), reduce pain (outcome)? EXECUTE THE SEARCH Now that our research question is spelled out, let's search in PubMed. First, go to the site (Image 1, page 118). In the blank text box to the right of "Search PubMed for," type the search terms. We'll form our search from the elements in our PICO question. The more search terms, the narrower the results, so we'll keep that in mind. We decide there are probably few articles available on our specific subject, so—even though our interest is older adults with arthritis—we'll consider articles about other age groups. We decide not to restrict the search by age, so arthritis is the only patient term we'll add to the search box. Our intervention is massage, so that definitely belongs in the search. visit massageandbodywork.com to access your digital magazine 117