Breast massage boosted milk supply and eased engorgement in new mothers

Worries about milk supply are among the most common struggles of the early postpartum weeks, and engorgement, breast pain and anxiety can make feeding miserable at exactly the moment it needs to be established. Breast massage is a traditional, low-cost technique used in many cultures to encourage milk flow and relieve discomfort, but the individual trials testing it have been small and their findings scattered. This review set out to pool every randomised trial of breast massage against control interventions, to establish whether the technique genuinely increases milk production and eases breastfeeding discomfort.

The authors searched PubMed, Scopus, ScienceDirect and two Thai research databases from inception to July 2025, including only randomised controlled trials that reported the effect of breast massage on milk production or breastfeeding discomfort. Study quality was assessed with the Cochrane Collaboration's risk-of-bias tool. Eighteen trials with 1,099 postpartum women met the criteria, and the pooled outcomes spanned milk volume, engorgement, pain and breast temperature, infant urination and defecation, complete breastfeeding rates, anxiety and serum prolactin levels.

Women who received breast massage produced significantly more milk than controls, with a pooled standardised mean difference of 0.76, though the trials varied widely in how large the benefit was. Massage also reduced scores for engorgement, pain and breast temperature, increased the number of infant urinations, lowered anxiety and raised serum prolactin, and engorgement resolved more often in the massage groups. Two outcomes did not move: infant defecations showed no significant difference between groups, and neither did rates of complete breastfeeding.

The direction of benefit was consistent across a large number of trials, which strengthens the case that breast massage does something real for milk output and early breast discomfort. The wide disagreement between trials on the size of the effect, possibly reflecting different massage techniques, timings and comparison groups, means the benefit any individual woman could expect is genuinely uncertain. And the fact that complete breastfeeding rates did not differ leaves open the bigger question of whether the short-term gains translate into more women breastfeeding successfully over time.

For a new mother, or anyone supporting one, this is a reason to view breast massage as a legitimate option for increasing milk volume and easing engorgement and pain, rather than mere folk practice. The accompanying reduction in anxiety is worth knowing about in a period when feeding difficulties weigh heavily. What the evidence does not show is that massage changes whether women achieve complete breastfeeding, so it is best understood as help with comfort and supply in the moment rather than a guarantee of long-term feeding outcomes.