Hospital and hospice patients often feel pain, anxiety, loneliness, fear—and those feelings may be especially acute when the patient is a child. Research shows that massage can help ease both physical discomfort and emotional anguish, so massage for pediatric patients might be a logical next step in palliative care. It is also the focus of a new organization.

According to Integrative Touch for Kids Executive Director Shay Beider, physicians are increasingly interested in providing palliative care, including complementary therapies like massage, to both children and adults.

"There is this growing number of physicians who recognize the value and requests that the families of the children are making, to be able to have these alternative services," she says. "[The services are] gaining respect and credibility."

Beider notes that studies conducted by the Touch Research Institutes at the University of Miami School of Medicine show that massage alleviates pain, anxiety and depression in pediatric clients. Young patients' parents offer loads of anecdotal evidence as well, she adds. "They talk about when they massage their child once a day for 30 days, differences they saw, children sleeping better, mobility improved."

Autistic kids' touch-aversion decreases with massage, while their ability to focus increases; and young cystic-fibrosis patients' pulmonary function and ability to breathe both increase after receiving healthy touch, Beider says.

Before starting Integrative Touch for Kids, Beider was children's-program director at The Heart Touch Project, a Los-Angeles based nonprofit that networks volunteer massage therapists with hospitalized and homebound people. While with Heart Touch, Beider was instrumental in getting a massage program implemented at Children's Hospital Los-Angeles. She's drawing from that experience, where success came after she began working with the hospital's staff and administration to develop the program rather than trying to bring massage therapists in from outside the facility, in developing Integrative Touch for Kids.

Instead of comprising a group of volunteers that visits medical facilities—the model that so many massage-outreach groups follow—Integrative Touch for Kids' staff educates physicians and medical facilities' staff about the benefits of pediatric massage and how to find massage therapists in their local communities. Each facility will then run its own program and decide whether its massage therapists will work in volunteer or paid positions.

Beider has begun educating both physicians and massage therapists about pediatric massage. She co-taught a workshop at the American Academy of Pediatrics' Pediatric Pain Symposium in September, and she is teaching at massage schools across the country.

In addition to traveling and teaching, Beider has a private massage practice in Southern California. But despite her long hours—she dedicates up to 40 hours each week to build the foundation of Integrative Touch for Kids—there's nothing she'd rather be doing than working for what she believes in.

"When you're in line with exactly what you want to see in the world, [hard work] doesn't matter, it's a great feeling," Beider says. "This is what I'd truly like to see materialize in the world: I'd like to see every child who goes into hospital or hospice get massage.

"It's really the feeling of tremendous excitement and recognition," she adds, "that we're going to be able to make some inroads in that direction."

For more information, visit www.integrativetouch.org.

— Karen Menehan