Pushing back against that massage-for-exercise-soreness paper ∞
Many massage therapists have cited this scientific paper lately because it confirms their bias that massage helps post-exercise muscle soreness. And no wonder! The conclusion reads:
Massage seems to be the most effective method for reducing DOMS and perceived fatigue.
So massage therapists were tripping over themselves sharing it on Facebook, retweeting it, and posting it on their clinic blogs. Such conclusions are literally good for business. “From the Department of the Obvious,” one MT quipped. Another triumphantly declared that it meant that “PainScience.com gets it wrong again!” As if one new publication beats all the analysis of the evidence I’ve published here over the years. 🙄
But Dupuy et al is
Alex Hutchinson wrote about this for Outside, and included a terrific summary of how publication bias is exposed by funnel plots — a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of research.
This kind of thing is the legacy of decades of publish-or-perish pressure in academia. Recovery science is a mess, most of the studies are just junk, and so most meta-analyses are too… and there’s a lot of them. John Ioannidis:
The production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses has reached epidemic proportions. Possibly, the large majority of produced systematic reviews and meta-analyses are unnecessary, misleading, and/or conflicted.
We never could take the conclusions of any kind of paper at face value, but meta-analysis has betrayed us so often that this entire category of scientific publishing now must be regarded with full suspicion — especially when it’s telling us what we want to hear.
