Massage Therapists Ease the Pain of Hospice Patients

— But Aren’t Easy to Find

Cindy Spence, one of three licensed massage therapists on staff at Faith Presbyterian Hospice in Dallas, gives a client a massage in this undated photo.

By Kate Ruder

Ilyse Streim views massage for people in hospice care as “whispering to the body through touch.”

“It’s much lighter work. It’s nurturing. It’s slow,” said Streim, a licensed massage therapist.

Massage therapy for someone near the end of life looks and feels different from a spa treatment. Some people stay clothed or lie in bed. Others sit up in their wheelchairs. Streim avoids touching bedsores and fresh surgery wounds and describes her work as “meditating and moving at the same time.” She recalled massaging the shoulders, hands, and feet of one client as he sat in his favorite recliner and watched baseball on TV in the final weeks of his life.

“When you’re dying and somebody touches you without expectation of anything in return, you just get to be,” said Streim.

Massage therapists like Streim, who specializes in working with people who are dying or have an advanced form of cancer or other illness, are rare. Fewer than 1% of therapists specialize in hospice or palliative care massage, according to research by the American Massage Therapy Association, although many more may periodically offer massage for hospice patients.

Streim has a private practice in Lafayette, and her clients pay her out-of-pocket, as Medicare and private insurance typically don’t cover massage therapy. She also volunteers as a hospice massage therapist four hours a month.

It’s common for hospice organizations to use volunteer therapists for treatments, though some massage therapists, with physicians backing them, are pushing for paid positions as part of medical teams working alongside nurses and social workers. In the hospice unit at Palo Alto VA Medical Center, in Palo Alto, California, for example, massage therapists have been integral members of the multidisciplinary team for decades, said VJ Periyakoil, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the founding director of its palliative care education and training program.

The covid-19 pandemic made the recruitment of specialists for this intimate work, both paid and volunteer, more difficult, as the pool of massage therapists shrank amid school closures and exits from the profession. There are up to 10% fewer massage therapists today than before the pandemic, according to Les Sweeney, president of Associated Bodywork & Massage Professionals.

“It’s still hard for us to hire and recruit therapists,” said Kerry Jordan, operations director at Healwell, a nonprofit that trains and employs massage therapists to work in hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area.

For three weeks in April 2020, licensed massage therapist Cindy Spence, who works at Faith Presbyterian Hospice in Dallas, could not massage patients due to the state’s lockdown orders. Then, the state granted an allowance for massage therapists like her, working in medical settings under supervision, to resume giving massages. But it took several months for many therapists to return to work, and some didn’t return at all, Spence said.

“The pandemic was not kind to massage therapists,” Spence said. “And so we have lost a lot of people like me who are of an age and experience level that would really be called to and suitable” for oncology, hospice, and palliative massage.

“We need to get more therapists trained,” she said. She described receiving several calls each month from people who have found her name online. It has become harder since covid to find a therapist to refer them to, Spence said.

A photo of a woman lying down and receiving a head massage.
“The pandemic was not kind to massage therapists,” says Cindy Spence, a licensed massage therapist at Faith Presbyterian Hospice in Dallas. “And so we have lost a lot of people like me who are of an age and experience level that would really be called to and suitable” for oncology, hospice, and palliative massage.

At TRU Community Care, which operates in several locations in Colorado, Volunteer Services Supervisor Wendy Webster said massages are a top request from patients and their families, but they’re limited in how many sessions they can offer, with only two volunteer massage therapists. (A third volunteer did not return after the pandemic.)

Finding new massage therapist volunteers is challenging, said Webster, in part because they can earn money in other settings and “they’re coming to us for free.” Thirty years ago, TRU Community Care’s nonprofit status was the norm, but now the majority of hospices are for-profit, with growing investment from private equity.

Despite that shift, hospices still rely heavily on volunteers. Medicare pays for at least six months of hospice for a patient on the condition that providers use volunteers for at least 5% of the patient-care hours worked by paid staff and contractors. Sometimes, those volunteer hours are filled by massage therapists.

“All hospices, not-for-profit or for profit alike, should aim to include medically-trained massage therapists as part of best holistic care,” Hunter Groninger, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who directs palliative care at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email. Employing these specialists is beneficial and does not diminish the important service of volunteers, particularly in end-of-life care, he added.

More studies on the impact of specialized massage could enact changes in the field, said Cal Cates, founder and executive director of Healwell, which, since 2009, has trained 500 therapists in hospital-based and oncology massage, as well as in how to work collaboratively with doctors and nurses.

In a recent clinical trial of 387 patients in palliative care at MedStar, including some nearing the end of their lives, Groninger, Cates, Jordan, and other co-authors found that massage therapy improved quality of life.

Despite new research on the benefits of massage, Cates said, many hospices bring on volunteers who don’t have advanced training, because hospices may not know that specialized training — such as the kind Healwell offers — exists.

Streim, who paid for her own classes in oncology and lymphatic massage, said that investment in education qualified her for a six-year career as an oncology massage therapist at Good Samaritan Medical Center’s Center for Integrative Medicine in Lafayette and later her private practice. She teaches classes in adapting massage for the elderly and those with illnesses at Boulder Massage Therapy Institute. In her 39 years as a therapist, Streim has done it all: volunteer, staff, entrepreneur, teacher.

Like Streim, Spence has continually redefined her role. She began in private practice before becoming an employee of a large hospice agency in which she traveled across nine counties in Texas, giving thousands of massages to people dying in their homes, assisted living communities, and skilled nursing homes. Today, at Faith Presbyterian Hospice, she is one of three licensed massage therapists on staff and fully integrated as an employee of the organization, which has more than 100 patients.

“Those of us who do this work have made big investments in our profession and I’m glad to see that we can be paid for it,” she said.

Spence collects data on how patients rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 before and after a massage. Most fall asleep during the massage, which she takes as an indication their pain has lessened or they became more relaxed. Of those who stay awake, almost all say their pain subsided significantly or went away completely.

That kind of positive engagement with providers is more urgent than ever since the pandemic, Groninger said. Spence agreed: “The pandemic taught us all, in a very painful way, what it’s like to be deprived of human touch and human connections.”

Sometimes the nursing staff at Faith Presbyterian will roll a bed out onto the patio so a patient can hear the sounds of nature and the fountain gurgling during Spence’s massage. There is more teasing and laughter than she would have imagined. For patients unable to speak, Spence watches their reactions carefully: a deep exhalation or the face and body softening. Sometimes it’s tears running down their cheeks.

“It’s profound, helping someone find safe breaths along this very difficult dying journey,” she said.

Complete Article HERE!

The Comfort of Hospice Massage at Life’s End

Hospice massage was once distrusted, but now helps thousands die comfortably

Licensed massage therapist Cindy Spence providing a massage for a 41-year-old breast cancer patient, five weeks prior to death.

By Bill Ward

In 1998, Cindy Spence watched in horror as her hospitalized, cancer-stricken father-in-law was denied the massage he desperately requested. Then and there, the Texas woman’s career path became clear.

“He entered a pain-filled and despondent state in which the only thought that gave him any pleasure at all was to have a hospice therapist come to his hospital room,” Spence recalls. But in 1998, massage therapy was contraindicated for cancer patients. The thinking was that massage would spread cancer cells or might break a tumor.

“That just felt wrong to me,” Spence says.

Now Spence is one of hundreds of hospice massage therapists nationwide, working at the T. Boone Pickens Center at Faith Presbyterian Hospice in Dallas. MK Brennan, president of the Society for Oncology Massage, estimates that at least 250 U.S. hospitals provide hospice massage, and the number is growing.

According to the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA), massage therapy was a $16 billion industry in the country in 2017 — more than twice the revenues of a decade earlier.

“Ever since the 1940s and ’50s, we’ve been working to establish ourselves as health care providers rather than adult entertainers,” Brennan says.

This perception had changed little when massage therapist Irene Smith basically launched the hospice massage field in 1982. Nor had the other part of the equation — hospice care — caught on.

“You had two topics within the field that have been very scary to the general public,” Smith says. “Massage was not a mainstream modality of care for many, many years, and death has never been a dinner-table conversation until the past decade.”

It didn’t help that, at least literally, we were not a “touchy-feely” society.

“Touch has been very misunderstood,” Smith says. “Touch is in the forefront of neuroscience, with more information coming to the mainstream public in relation to the positive outcomes of being touched. More and more people are becoming aware of its benefits from birth to death.”

That’s why Smith founded the influential California-based Everflowing program, whose mission is “to teach mindful touching and the practice of therapeutic presence as opportunities to recognize and express tenderness in caregiving.”

The Public Presses the Issue of Hospice Massage

Integration of massage at medical facilities often requires public demand. As hospice massage therapists toiled as freelancers and volunteers, patients and their families saw the benefits of the practice and increasingly have come to insist on it.

“We have seen a definite acceptance and growth for requesting massage,” says Meg Robsahm, an independent hospice massage therapist in Rochester, Minn. “We have also seen an increase in hospice companies adding it to their service menus simply because of demand.”

Massage therapist Theresa J. Herman of Allina Health’s hospice program out of Minneapolis has observed a similar progression.

“I started as a volunteer. The patients were beginning to ask for this, so all the big [facilities] realized they couldn’t provide coverage with just volunteers,” Herman says. “Insurance wouldn’t cover it, so we had to come up with donations, philanthropy or pulling it out of little corners of the budget.”

Still, Brennan says, staff positions for hospice massage therapists remain relatively limited, and there are few signs that insurers will start including it in their standard coverage. On the contrary, independent massage therapists are strongly advised to buy liability coverage to work in hospice care.

Touching in Many Ways

At least for now, advocates for hospice massage have research on their side.

According to the AMTA, a 2014 study focused on integrating massage therapy into palliative care found “statistically significant changes in pain, anxiety, relaxation and inner peace of patients, decreasing both pain intensity and anxiety while increasing the patients’ sense of relaxation and inner peace.” (Palliative, or comfort, care is appropriate for people of any age at any stage of a serious illness. Hospice care is generally for those who have six or fewer months to live and who are no longer receiving active treatment.)

The study’s results are why these therapists recognize that their role is, as Smith puts it, “to comfort — not cure — to validate, to honor, to soothe and to respect.”

Other therapists often point to the wide-ranging, even holistic nature of their work.

“The dying process involves physical, spiritual, mental and emotional pain,” Spence says. “RNs can work with the physical pain, chaplains with the spiritual pain and social workers with the mental and emotional pain. I feel that massage and music therapy are the only ones that treat all of those modalities.”

Getting the Family Involved

Smith and her peers strive to have family members present during hospice massage sessions, not just to observe but to participate — to learn how to be gentle with touch.

“Families sometimes have no way to connect with their loved ones, and massage can offer that connection,” Robsahm says. “It can bring a sense of peacefulness in the end stages.”

Families are generally relieved that their loved ones are finding relief and relaxation.

“Especially as someone is close to death — say 48 hours — if I’m in the midst of that family and they’re interested, I will have them sit next to me and have them do what I do,” Robsahm says. “At a certain point, my time will be up, and they will get to be the person to hold their hand, stroke their neck, put oil or lotion on their feet.”

The patient and the family are not alone in reaping something profound out of the experience, according to Spence.

“I have made a commitment to find every ounce of joy,” Spence says. “I knew when I came in that there would be a lot of sorrow, but I didn’t know I would laugh with patients and their families as much as I have.”

Or, as Robsahm puts it: “It moves beyond physical contact. We touch people’s bodies, and in the end, we touch them in their soul.”

Complete Article HERE!