Therapeutic massage has evolved from one of the most important and instinctive human needs - to touch and be touched. Paintings in Egyptian tombs show people being massaged. The emperor Julius Caesar was accustomed to have a daily massage for his neuralgia, and the physicians of ancient Greece and Rome valued the power of touch as a method of relieving pain. Massage also plays a part in sophisticated Eastern healing systems, including those of China, Tibet, Japan, Indonesia and India.
In the West, massage is increasingly used therapeutically and in clinical settings by professionally trained masseurs and health care workers such as nurses. It is also routinely used within the NHS in intensive care units for people with cancer, heart disease and AIDS, for children and premature babies, for elderly people, and in ordinary health care centres, pain clinics and drug dependency clinics. Nine out of ten hospices in Britain also offer some form of physical therapy, including shiatsu, reflexology and massage. Doctors usually regard massage as a complementary therapy in addition to medical treatment, rather than as a separate therapy in its own right.