History
The Beginning
The Heart Touch Project was begun by Shawnee Isaac Smith, a certified bodyworker. In the early 1990s, she had a request for a bodywork session from a friend who was terminally ill with AIDS. At the time, an AIDS diagnosis was a virtual death sentence and there a widespread reluctance among bodyworkers to touch anyone infected with the virus. Shawnee agreed, but reluctantly.
That one session affected her deeply. She realized that providing caring, compassionate touch to a person at the end of life can be a profound experience and a tremendous gift—both for the client and for the therapist.
Other persons with AIDS began calling Shawnee for treatment. Soon she needed to recruit other massage therapists to help but quickly realized they needed training to work with this vulnerable population. Shawnee worked with Georgia Noble, Ed.D., to design a training curriculum to help the volunteers become more compassionate and informed in their work. In exchange for the three-day training, the volunteers committed themselves to provide a weekly massage to a person with AIDS for one year. This was 1994 and Heart Touch was born.
In 2002 researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, aware that The Heart Touch Project focused on AIDS care, asked Heart Touch to participate in a research project funded by National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The purpose of the study was to test the effectiveness of massage therapy as an alternative to drugs in the treatment of depression for those with end-stage AIDS. The study showed that, as in intervention, massage was as effective in treating depression in these individuals as a drug regimen and had the added benefit of having no side effects.
Hospice Program
As more effective HIV/AIDS medications became available, a diagnosis of AIDS became a condition that one lived with rather than died from. As Heart Touch clients became healthier, we expanded our outreach and began sending volunteers to elder care facilities and hospices.
Volunteers went to a number of retirement homes and we established partnerships with several hospice facilities in the Los Angeles area. Our work with the elderly now focuses exclusively on those in hospice, which means that these individuals have medical diagnosis of six or less months to live.
Click here for more information on the Hospice Program.
Children’s Program
With a grant from First 5 Los Angeles (Proposition 10), we expanded our focus to serve children who are hospitalized or who are in hospice. We began by participating in a study at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles that measured parent satisfaction with massage on their infants in the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine published the results of that study. At present, our Children’s Program continues to serve children and families at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and we have added Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to our service areas.
Heart Touch volunteers also work with children through TrinityKids Care—the division of TrinityCare Hospice that is devoted exclusively to hospice care for terminally ill children.
Click here for more information on the Children’s Program.
International Outreach Program
The International Outreach Program was initiated in 2007 in response to a request from a Heart Touch volunteer, who felt that HIV/AIDS orphans in her native Thailand would benefit from the work of Heart Touch. More recently Heart Touch volunteers have traveled to Cambodia and India to work with children and adults there.
Click here for more information on the International Outreach Program.
Results
Over the years, Heart Touch has trained more than 3,500 bodywork professionals, who have given more than 23,000 free massages to 1,000 of the most vulnerable members of our community. Heart Touch has also educated thousands of medical staff, parents and other caregivers, both nationally and internationally, about the therapeutic benefits of massage.
Volunteers with the Heart Touch Project have been at the forefront of a movement to bring the therapeutic and curative benefits of professional bodywork to vulnerable populations.
