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Neural Therapy is a minigame released with the Base expansion that added the Health Center. In it, you skillfully massage your operatives to earn various rewards.

Getting Started

The minigame can be accessed by interacting with the treatment log in the Health Center located on the second floor of the base.

Classic Yao, taking full advantage of any time off she gets.

Here, you can view your overall progress rewards, as well as select an operative to view their personal clear rewards and begin a treatment session.

Gameplay Basics

The goal of each treatment session is to turn all the yellow and red nodes on an operative green. These nodes are split into two groups, the back group and the leg group. This will actually be important later. No, I'm not joking.

Red nodes will become yellow nodes when massaged, and yellow nodes become green.

You do this by massaging each node via one of two methods, both of which will use up your stamina meter which can be seen at the bottom right of the screen during sessions:

Palm: massages the selected node.
Fist: massages the selected node, but also massages nearby nodes at half the speed of the selected node. In the back group, this AoE effect applies to all other back group nodes. In the leg group, it will apply to adjacent leg group nodes that are above, below, or to the left or right of the selected node. It is not possible to affect back group nodes if you have a leg group node selected, and vice versa.

Both of these methods actually clear nodes at the same speed, and cost the same amount of stamina to use. So why would you ever use the palm method?

Simply put, you don't want to overdo it. Continuing to massage already-cleared nodes will slowly turn them gray, which will lead to you having to use the third massage type (what I like to call the oopsie hand) to undo your mistake. This also costs stamina, so it's obviously advised to not have to do this.

But you don't actually have to worry about this as long as you don't turn a node completely gray. This will be important to clearing higher-difficulty levels in some cases.

Strategy

Due to the fist massage's ability to affect multiple nodes, you'll want to use this whenever possible. Prioritize targeting red nodes with plenty of adjacent nodes that can be AoE'd:

Adjacent yellow nodes will turn green in the time it takes a targeted red node to turn green with the fist massage, allowing you to clear multiple yellow nodes that might be adjacent to a red node.
Adjacent red nodes will turn yellow in the time it takes a targeted red node to turn green. You can take advantage of this clear one red node halfway (to yellow), then switch to the other red node and fully clear that. Half-and-halfing adjacent red nodes like this will allow you to clear two red nodes more efficiently than fully completing one node then finishing off the other. Depending on your timing and how much extra attention you give to keeping the two nodes balanced, you'll probably end up with a little bit unfinished on one of the two nodes, but you still save a lot of stamina overall. This can be done with yellow nodes as well, but with less effectiveness due to having less room to work with.
If you can get coverage on multiple nodes with the fists, it can be worth it to use this method even if it means that you'll start overworking an adjacent green node. Remember, adjacent nodes fill up at half the speed of the targeted node, and it's okay to let green nodes turn partially gray as long as they don't completely fill up.

Once you've done as much fist action as you can safely get away with, use the palm massage to finish off any remaining nodes.

As an aside, it's also worth noting that while most operatives have their nodes laid out to have a 2x2 back group and 5x2 leg group, Katya actually has a 1x2 back group and a 6x2 leg group:

Your guess is as good as mine as to why this is, but the only reasoning I can come up with is that she's the tallest of the currently available operatives, at least one inch taller than everyone else.

Difficulty Levels

There are three difficulty levels available to choose from: easy, normal, and hard. Of the three, normal is arguably where you'll have the most trouble, as there's a good chance that you won't have enough stamina to clear, even if you play as optimally as possible. Without stamina upgrades (more on this later), you'll have to reset attempts until you get a perfect spawn that allows you to clear it, and I'd rather save that luck for the gacha.

But interestingly enough, once you unlock a few stamina upgrades and can start comfortably clearing normal, you'll find that hard is a much smaller leap in difficulty in comparison. This is likely due to having a high density of nodes which allows you to be much more efficient with your fist massages. In contrast, normal difficulty has more nodes than easy, but not enough for you to be able to take advantage of the AoE effects of the fist massage as effectively.

Stamina Upgrades (And Rewards)

As you perform more massages, you'll gain XP towards your overall "massage level," for lack of a better term. Levelling up will give you various rewards, including a higher massage stamina capacity which will make attempting higher difficulty levels much, much easier. Yes, this means that you will almost definitely have to grind for XP on lower difficulty levels to farm XP and unlock stamina upgrades in order to move on to higher difficulty levels.

...But most people don't seem to mind having to massage their operatives more, for whatever reason. I wonder why.

The rewards available through raising your massage level are as follows: