Monday, 30 March 2009

Pracitioners offer tender loving care to children in pain

Give physical therapy to a child suffering from chronic pain, and you’ll provide relief for a day. Teach a child’s parents to give the therapy, and the cure could last a lifetime.

So goes the logic of Samuel Schoononver and Libby Brady-Eichbaum, directors of The Foundation for Tender Loving Care Touch in Santa Cruz. The organization, now six months old, is growing, and Schoononver and Brady-Eichbaum are scrambling for community volunteers and UC Santa Cruz students to assist in furthering the spread of TLC.

Schoononver and Brady-Eichbaum will be teaching classes at UC Santa Cruz in the spring quarter and will also be offering community workshops and open house demonstrations. The focus will be on basic acupressure, massage, reflexology and Reiki energy therapy, a system of touch developed in Japan in 1922 that conducts the body’s electrical energy into motion and creates a symbiotic feel-good circuit between the provider and the patient. Such treatments have shown effectiveness in treating patients with various forms of cancer, ADHD, autism, cerebral palsy, and other physical and mental disorders. Once students learn these treatment tools they will be sent to hospitals and clinics to provide therapists, nurses and parents with the same skills. 

Schoononver, who taught massage for 17 years in the ’80s and ’90s, is an old hand at assisting children afflicted by disease and chronic pain. Between 1990 and 1995, Schoononver operated a recreational program called the Magic Performers of America Club. He taught magic tricks to groups of sick, recovering or emotionally bereaved children and led fieldtrips during which the kids would entertain others. The program was effective, says Schoononver, boosting self-esteem and generally lifting spirits all around, but what it lacked, he later realized, was any element of human touch. It also ran short of funding.

Last summer, Schoononver and Brady-Eichbaum launched the Foundation for TLC Touch, envisioning much more than a one-child-at-a-time therapy program. Instead, the pair aimed to create a more cost-effective system by which they would teach the skills and benefits of human touch to others who would in turn go outward and train caretakers of hospitalized children to provide the hands-on physical therapy. The program will focus on the training of, specifically, parents of the children, with the goal of helping to create long-lasting emotional bonds.

“What we’re doing is like teaching someone to fish instead of just giving them one fish,” explains Schoononver. “Our students are going to be teaching parents to make a connection with their children that will last a lifetime.”

Since August, Schoononver and Brady-Eichbaum, a Reiki specialist and a veteran grant writer—another necessity of the young nonprofit—have been visiting The Family House in San Francisco, a nonprofit that provides temporary housing for families with children undergoing cancer treatment at UCSF. Here, the pair is teaching the basic science of human touch to the parents and relatives of the children. Schoonover and Brady are now entering a similar program at the Sub-Acute Saratoga Children’s Hospital, and the partners see a need for their service at several other children’s hospitals throughout the Bay Area as well as schools in Santa Cruz County.

The Touch Research Institute in Miami, the leading authority in the science of touch, has conducted more than 100 studies showing how the simple process of human-to-human contact can produce quantifiable positive results, not just on an emotional level, but physically. For example, the institute has observed increases in red and white blood cell counts when subjects were treated with varying forms and levels of human contact. Thus, the benefits offered by the Foundation for TLC Touch are real.

“We want to show family members how to connect to children in a positive way,” said Brady-Eichbaum, whose own grandson was born two months premature. Weighing less than four pounds, the infant required weeks of hospitalization and an elaborate life support system. Brady-Eichbaum watched her daughter struggle throughout the ordeal.

“Some parents have trouble even knowing where to begin when their child is all hooked up like that,” observes Brady-Eichbaum. “They can be overwhelmed by the machinery.”

But simple acupressure, massage and Reiki can build connections between provider and patient in complex ways. Reflexology can even address specific physical maladies, utilizing pressure points on the feet and hands that correlate to and affect internal organs.

Schoononver notes that feelings of helplessness sometimes crush the parents of ill children. What they don’t realize, says Schoononver, is the power of their own touch.

“Many of these parents whose children are sick feel powerless to help. Thing is, they’re not.”

Brady-Eichbaum’s and Schoononver’s course at UC Santa Cruz will serve as a pilot program, and they hope that, with sufficient funding, the power of TLC will spread, first across Santa Cruz County and the South Bay, then, perhaps, the world.

Visit tenderlovingcaretouch.org for more information about the Foundation for Tender Loving Care Touch. The first workshop dates are April 4, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., April 5, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and April 12 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at UCSC, exact location to be determined. Call 334-0333 or e-mail ftlctouch@gmail.comftlctouch@gmail.com ftlctouch@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it for more information.