Itching, Pain, and Anxiety Levels Are Reduced With Massage Therapy...

Burn, a person may face, is one of the statuses, which can be a most severe physical and psychologic trauma. Patients with burns commonly have severe itching and pain. Severe itching has also been associated with the anxiety, sleep disturbance, and disruption of daily living activities. The addition of complementary treatments to standard care may lead to a greater pain management and may offer a safer approach for reducing pain and procedural anxiety for patients with burns. The authors conducted an experimental study to examine whether the effects of massage therapy reduced burned adolescents' pain, itching, and anxiety levels. Sixty-three adolescents were enrolled in this study shortly after admission (mean days = 3 +/- 0.48) at a burn unit in a large university hospital from February 2008 to June 2009. The measures including the pain, itching, and state anxiety were collected on the first and last days of the 5-week study period. The participants had an average age of 14.07 +/- 1.78 years and came usually from the lower socioeconomic strata. The authors observed that massage therapy reduced all these measures from the first to the last day of this study (P < .001). In most cultures, massage treatment are used to alleviate a wide range of symptoms. Although health professionals agree on the use of nonpharmacologic method for patients with burns, these applications are not yet common.

J Burn Care Res. 2010 Mar 31. Parlak A, Polat S, Nuran Akçay M. From the *Department of Pediatric Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, Atatürk University, Erzurum; daggerDepartment of Pediatric Nursing, Bozok University, School of Health, Yozgat; and double daggerDepartment of General Surgery, Medical Faculty, Atatürk University, Erzurum, Turkey.