Amber Clark read off a list of instructions to some second-year massage therapy students Monday afternoon as they slowly worked out the kinks in the necks, shoulders and backs of more than half a dozen residents at the Aspen Ridge Retirement Community.

“They just love being engaged,” Clark said of the students, who are enrolled in her advanced clinic class at Central Oregon Community College’s massage therapy program.

For the past month, Clark’s students have been giving free 30-minute chair massages to six or seven residents at the northeast Bend retirement community. It’s part of an experiment Clark designed to see whether massage therapy can have an impact on a senior’s overall health and wellbeing while also making it easier for them to perform certain activities most people take for granted.

According to the American Massage Therapy Association’s website, a handful of studies conducted over the past 10 to 20 years have already found links between massage therapy and improvements to a senior’s health.

They include:

• A 2006 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine that found people who suffer from osteoarthritis in their knees and received eight weeks of massages experienced less pain, stiffness and physical disability than those who did not.

• A 2001 study published in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatology found that 57 percent of seniors who suffered from osteoarthritis received a massage in the past five months because it helped them deal with their pain.

• A series of studies published in Dementia, the International Journal of Nursing Practices, the Journal of Clinical Nursing, and the Journal of Gerontological Nursing, found that hand and foot massage helped people with dementia relax and become less agitated.

Clark hopes to add to this body of work by focusing her study on whether massage therapy makes it easier for seniors to bathe, get dressed, prepare their own meals and perform other activities of daily living people must do so they can live independently.

She said the sessions involving Aspen Ridge’s residents were only the first, or pilot phase, of this project.

Once this phase is finished, Clark said she’d like to see her project expanded to other long-term care facilities in Central Oregon and eventually to other massage schools across the country.

“We just want to bring more awareness to the (massage) community and have our students get more involved in the research process,” said Clark, who plans to discuss the project at an upcoming Associated Massage and Bodywork Professionals conference.

But even though her work is still preliminary, Clark said it’s been having some results. She said that while not a lot has changed, the people who have received her students’ massages were sleeping better at night and were experiencing a lot less pain than before.

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com