The Relationship between Prevalence of Applied Thai Massage and Cause of Diseases

Abstract

Thai people got problems of musculoskeletal system and connective tissues and this resulted in over 1,700 million baht for medicines each year. The aims of this study were to find out the relationship between the prevalence of patients applied Thai massage and bio-social factors through the cause of diseases treated by the principles of Thai traditional medicine and massage therapy. This project employed the cross-sectional method with prospective studies. The samples of 776 were chosen by simple random sampling from the population of 1,552 patients of Applied Thai Traditional Medicine College in 2007-2008. All patients were interviewed and the general data was analyzed to find out the relationship between the prevalence of applied massage and bio-social factors. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square were used for data analysis. The results showed that most of patients got problems on backaches 42.4 % and neck and shoulder pains 39.3%. Both pains resulted from the prevalence of gender, occupation, the four traditional elements (earth, wind, fire and water), age group, weather, period of day and cause of 5 diseases of work characteristics, rest, sadness, anger, and surroundings with statistically significant difference at 0.05. It was recommended that people should understand and take action in personal health care by applying the principles of Thai traditional medicine in their daily lives.