Our family have been looking for a massage chair for some time now. My mother not only has cancer of the spine but it has spread to her hip and if that wasn’t enough she has cervical spondilitis in her neck and shoulder too. As a family we thought we would club together and buy her a chair (they are not cheap!), in the hope that it would relieve some of the pain. When we came to look for a suitable one however, we found that there were all sorts of different options available.
A bit of history first. Massage chairs were were first available in the late 1980’s. They were developed to emulate the techniques and motions used by an real masseuse. The objective was to relieve stress and tension and to help improve back pain. The expense of producing the chairs, which had to be passed on to the customer, meant that they were usually beyond the reach of most people. Now, twenty years later and the cost of producing the chairs has gone down and more and more people are benefiting from the effects.
Massage chairs attempt to recreate two types of techniques – Shiatsu and Swedish massage. These two techniques are quite different. Shiatsu tends to...