Efficacy of Therapeutic Massage (Dalk) with Dill Seed Oil in Management of Neck Pain

Abstract

By affecting person’s life both at home and at work place, now neck pain becomes a public health issue. It produces significant disability by restricting the neck movements. Despite tremendous advancement in medical science it still fails to explain the exact pathophysiology, effective treatment, prevention and rehabilitative measures for neck pain. Every prevailing pain relieving regimen is only short term. Because of all the above factors the classical popular regimens of Unani System of Medicine i.e., massage with Dill Seed Oil was tested in present study for its efficacy in halting the progress and relieving the neck pain. Present study was an observational study with a sample size of 50 and was of 3 months duration. Dalk–layyin-kaseer (massage with soft-hand for long duration) with Dill Seed Oil was done on neck for 20 minutes on alternate day in first week and twice a week there after for another 11 weeks. Improvement in subjective and objective parameters were assessed on every sitting, at the end of the treatment and fortnightly for 1 month in follow up period. The mean duration of neck pain, VAS score, NS grade and RNM grade at baseline were 2½ years, 5.8, 3.14 and 1.94 respectively;these were completely relieved in a mean of 9.32 sittings. Surprisingly it was observed that no patient have reported reoccurrence during follow up. This study suggests that therapeutic massage is safe and has clinically important benefits in alleviating the neck pains and associated symptoms.