A Massage Therapist's Guide to Pain, Touch, and Perception

The Massage Therapist's Guide to Pain, Touch and Perception reframes how touch therapists understand and work with pain. Drawing on modern pain science, Ruth A. Duncan challenges traditional tissue‑focused explanations and instead presents pain as a protective output of the brain shaped by biology, emotion, memory, and context.

The author explains key concepts such as nociceptive, neuropathic, and nociplastic pain; the biopsychosocial model; and how the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems...