In a Nutshell:
The Medical Breakthrough 8 massage chair is a terrifyingly expensive chair offered by a brand you may not have heard of. Recommended for provisionally recommended for people who can afford them and who have specific therapeutic needs.
Overall Massage Quality
Customization options
Ease of Use
Brand Reliability*
Overall Rating
4.1/5
Benefits
Drawbacks
Provisionally recommended for people who can afford them and who have specific therapeutic needs.
Are you in constant pain? If you suffer from a condition like fibromyalgia, have recently had any type of surgery, have recently been in a car accident, or suffer pain for any other reason, finding a good quality massage chair with therapeutic features can be a real challenge.
There are so many models on the market that you can suffer from analysis paralysis trying to narrow the field to find the “right” chair for you.
If that describes your situation, you’re going to be very intrigued by what you read in this, our Medical Breakthrough 8 Massage Chair Review.
We’ll be the first to admit that this chair isn’t for everyone. It’s expensive. No, it’s beyond expensive, which will almost certainly put it out of the reach of many.
On top of that, it’s offered by a brand that you may not have heard of, which may give you pause.
It can be a little terrifying to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a machine offered by a smaller, lesser-known company.
Despite that, there are some truly compelling reasons you may want to invest in this chair or one of the other models the company makes. In the sections that follow, we’ll tell you everything this chair has to offer, and we won’t pull any punches when it comes to describing the limitations and shortcomings of the Medical Breakthrough massage chair 8.
If your interest is piqued, read on, and we’ll tell you all about it!
An Overview Of The Medical Breakthrough 8 Massage Chair
The very first thing to mention about this model is the fact that an insane amount of research went into their design and the chairs are handcrafted from scratch by Davide Maret.
Initially, the company had a note on their website that you could have yours ordered to exact specification by calling the company, but they have apparently discontinued that and removed it from their site. Even so, this chair stands apart, given the enormous amount of research that went into creating one of the most versatile massage chairs we’ve ever seen.
The second thing to mention is the fact that the model we’re reviewing here isn’t the only model the company offers. There are other Medical Breakthrough massage chairs. Their product line currently includes:
Although the names of the various products aren’t terribly creative, it is easy to keep track of which model you’re looking at. Note too that prior models (1-3) have been discontinued in favor of these more advanced designs.
Okay, so with those two things out of the way, let’s talk about the look of this chair.
The Breakthrough 8 massage chair is a decent-looking chair as massage chairs go, but it makes no effort to hide what it is. Unless your living room has a sci-fi (Star Trek?) theme, it’s probably going to stick out.
It’s not an ugly piece of furniture; it’s simply that the design team behind the chair obviously cared a lot more about function than they did about form. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but it is something to keep in mind.
The other thing to mention before we leave this section is that this is a sizable piece of furniture.
Here are a few basics to illustrate:
Those last two items are worthy of a bit of additional discussion. Although we’re not huge fans of PU as an upholstery option, we have to admit that we’re a little impressed by what Medical Breakthrough has done here, utilizing a special curing process and thicker upholstery than what you find on most other chairs.
Taken together, this makes the Breakthrough 8’s upholstery both more durable and more comfortable. We love it, and we think you will too.
The final thing to talk about here is the fact that this chair was designed with “Wall Hugging” technology. Normally, a reclining chair has to be placed a foot or more from whatever wall you set it near. With this chair, all you need is about three inches of clearance. It still fills up a room, but the “Wall Hugging” feature makes it easier to find a permanent home for it.
L-Track & Quad Rollers
Many, if a slight majority of massage chairs on the market today, are built around an S-Track. These are relatively short massage tracks that run from the top of the chair down to the bottom edge of the seatback.
They give a good massage (or they can, depending on the rollers and other factors), but by definition, it’s somewhat limited. An S-Track massage chair isn’t what you want if you’ve got chronic pain centered in your thighs, legs, and feet.
The good news is that the Breakthrough 8 (and in fact all of Medical Breakthrough’s products) sports L-Track designs. Here, the massage track starts at the base of your neck/upper shoulder area and runs under the seat, enabling the rollers to massage your glutes and the backs of your thighs.
Even better, you’ll find auto-extending footwells filled with a combination of rollers and air cells, capable of rendering a world-class massage of your calves and feet. The fact that the footwells automatically extend allows this chair to accommodate users as short as 4’ and as tall as 6’5”, which is superb.
In addition to having a delightfully long massage track, the Breakthrough 8 features quad rollers which have, at this point, become the industry standard and provide a massage that feels amazingly like human hands.
Zero-G Seating
In addition to the long massage track, the Breakthrough 8 offers Zero-G seating, which is amazing. Inspired by NASA, it works by reclining you in a position such that your knees are elevated just above your heart, which genuinely gives you a feeling of weightlessness.
In addition to that, Zero-G helps you relax and improves blood flow, especially to your lower extremities. There’s even some evidence that it facilitates faster healing, so if you’ve recently had surgery of one type or another, it will get you back on your feet more quickly.
Our one issue here is that given the stunning price tag the Breakthrough 8 carries, we would have expected to see more than one Zero-G seating option on offer. One’s still better than none, but if you’re going to pay top dollar for something like this, we feel that it should offer absolutely everything. It’s not the end of the world, but we have to count it as a legitimate negative, given the price.
An Excellent Body Scanning Routine
Most massage chairs offer body scanning technology that will adjust the position of the rollers in the chair, so they give you a perfect massage every time you use it. The problem is that smaller brands tend to have body scanning tech that isn’t as effective or reliable.
That’s not the case here.
Medical Breakthrough did a superb job with their scanning tech, and you’ll find that it gets the roller position right almost every time. In those rare instances where something’s a little off, you’ll be able to manually tweak their positions via the remote, giving you the best of both worlds.
Some Out-Of-This-World Massage Options
This is hands down the most important segment of our Medical Breakthrough massage chair review. While most chairs offer some basic massage techniques and maybe 1-2 advanced options, this one will absolutely blow you away.
Here’s what you get:
While other Medical Breakthrough 8 plus reviews you may have read online make it a point to highlight this selection, we can’t sing its praises highly enough. You get more advanced techniques than basic, which is absolutely unheard of in the massage chair world. This, by itself, would almost be reason enough to warrant spending the heaping piles of money this model costs.
It gets better because the chair’s remote allows you to specify what specific body part or parts you want to focus on, choosing from the following options:
Again, this breakdown of body regions far outstrips what every other massage chair on the market has to offer. We’ve literally never reviewed another chair with this kind of granular breakdown, and that’s awesome.
One thing this chair doesn’t offer a lot of is predefined massage routines. There are only four on offer:
These all behave like you’d expect them to given the names. Relax is a gentle massage designed to help you sleep. Ease is a half-step above that, while ache release and fatigue recover are more vigorous and intense massages designed to help with post-workout aches and pains or to perk you up if your energy level is beginning to flag.
If all of that wasn’t enough, you can even order a body twist and a full-body stretch from the remote – two powerful therapeutic features that mimic a chiropractic adjustment.
In our view, although both are surprisingly good, they don’t quite measure up to the body twist/stretch functions offered by Kahuna chairs. But for a smaller brand, we were hugely impressed. Chronic pain sufferers will get a lot of mileage out of both of these.
Unlimited Massage
In a genuine departure, this chair doesn’t offer a timer feature. You select the massage you want and turn it on. It runs until you turn it off.
That’s staggering because every other chair we’ve reviewed has a built-in timer. The exact time frame of a massage may vary from one model to the next, but massages seldom last for more than thirty minutes and never extend beyond an hour because the motors that drive the massage rollers will burn out if you use them for too long at a stretch.
Not here.
This chair was designed for chronic pain sufferers and designed to offer constant relief. You can run the chair for eight hours a day if you like, though truthfully if you’re in that much pain, you may want to think about other alternatives. Even so, it’s awesome that your chosen options (which can be adjusted on the fly, of course) will just go until you tell it not to.
Best of all, the Breakthrough 8 offers a true deep tissue massage since the rollers are able to move along the X-, Y-, and Z-axis with four different intensity levels on offer and five different speed levels.
For an amazing deep tissue experience, put the chair in the Zero-G position so that your own body weight presses you more firmly into the seatback, which increases the pressure of the rollers even more. That’s an experience not to be missed if you’re looking for an intense massage!
The one thing we were genuinely disappointed with here is the lack of save slots that would allow you to create your perfect massage routine and save it for one-touch recall later on. Again, chairs at this price point should have every angle covered, in our view. So we definitely see this as a shortcoming, while we might forgive it on a less expensive model.
An Airbag Massage Too!
In addition to offering an exceptional roller-based massage, the Breakthrough 8 features a total of 167 air cells. These are airbags taken to a whole new level, and they’re capable of rendering an absolutely exquisite airbag-based massage that must be experienced to be fully appreciated. Note that the intensity of the airbag massage can be set via the remote, choosing from three intensity levels.
Whole Back Heat
About half (maybe slightly less) of the massage chairs on the market today offer heat in one form or another. Most of those offer lumbar heat only.
Heat is a powerful therapeutic feature that’s always a welcome addition, but we always find ourselves wishing that companies were more generous with it.
In this case, they are!
The heated zone of this chair is pretty extensive, covering the entire seatback and even extending down into your arms a bit. We love it.
Our only quibble is that for a chair in its price range, precise temperature control should be on offer. It’s a small quibble, but if you’re charging top dollar, that’s fair game in our book.
An Excellent Calf & Foot Massage
The whole chair is built around reflexology technology, and this also applies to the calf and foot massage.
The calf massage is rendered by air cells, and the foot massage is by rollers, which can be adjusted for both speed and intensity (three levels each).
We’ll be the first to admit that it feels amazing, but again, top dollar chair, so we were hoping to see heated footwells.
Some of the negatives we’re pointing out here may seem like quibbles, and honestly, for the most part, they are, but a chair that costs as much as a lightly used car needs to really bring its A-Game across the board to maximize value. That’s why we’re really getting into the weeds here.
A Few Extras Too!
One thing notably absent from this model are built-in speakers. We were curious about this at first because the manufacturer makes a point of stressing the USB port and Bluetooth compatibility, but the way the chair is designed, there’s just no room for speakers up by your head.
To counter that, the company includes a set of headphones with every chair and a flash drive preloaded with soothing nature sounds. Just plug the flash drive in, put your headphones on and relax while the chair massages all your troubles away. It’s a clever workaround, and we’re on board with it.
On top of that, you’ll also find an air ionization feature. Holistic medicine practitioners swear by its healing power. While there’s no scientific evidence to back up the claims, a relaxing breeze on your face feels good, so even if it’s not your thing, it’s worth trying. You never know you might like it!
Pros & Cons of Medical Breakthrough Massage Chair
There’s really only one significant drawback where this Breakthrough 8 chair is concerned: the price. If you’re not especially picky about where you live, you can find handyman special houses in some parts of the country that cost about as much as one of these chairs.
Every other shortcoming we mentioned here (lack of temperature control for the heat, only one Zero-G seating position, etc.) pales in comparison to the sticker shock.
The unfortunate thing about that is that it means a significant percentage of the people who would benefit the most from a chair like this will simply never be able to afford it. If you can, though, it’s an undeniably great chair, and we love almost everything about it.
Medical Breakthrough Massage Chair Conclusion
The Breakthrough 8 is a serious massage chair. It’s not designed for hobbyist users but rather for people who struggle and suffer from pain on a daily basis. Loaded with therapeutic features and powerful massage motors, this chair can provide chronic pain sufferers with genuine relief, IF you can afford it.
Unfortunately, that staggering price tag simply makes it a nonstarter for most of the market, and on that basis, we can only give it a provisional recommendation. If your budget will support it though, it’s an absolute wonder.
Other Options To Consider
If you’re looking for a chair with a genuine therapeutic value that mere mortals can afford, we recommend one of the following:
Recommended For: Anyone who can afford it. Exceptional therapeutic chair, made in the USA, packed with high-value features.
Or one of the other models Medical Breakthrough sells, like the:
Recommended For: People with chronic pain. While limited compared to the Breakthrough 8, this is significantly less expensive.
Both of these chairs are brimming with therapeutic features, and while they have limitations compared to the Breakthrough 8, they’re also significantly less expensive, and we heartily recommend both of these models for users with therapeutic needs who are seeking relief from chronic pain.
References & Resources:
- Medical Breakthrough Massage Chair, Official Brand Website.
- Medical Breakthrough FAQ
- Fibromyalgia Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis and Treatment, Spine Universe.
- Massage Therapy Restores Peripheral Vascular Function After Exertion, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
- Massage in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egypt Online.
