Three variations of massage therapy are available to patients at MSKCC: standard (“Swedish”) massage,5 light touch massage, and foot massage. A specific type of massage is requested for almost all referrals. Patients receive the requested type of massage approximately three times out of four. The majority of the remaining cases are requests for regular massage in which either light touch or foot massage was given, typically because the practitioner felt that a weak or late-stage patient could not tolerate a regular massage or because the patient was too ill to move into a comfortable position to
receive standard massage therapy.