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The
Village Voice (06/16/98)
Touched By An Angel
By Theresa M. Senft
"I woke, and I thought I might be dead," my mother told me. "It was like
when you are in a nightmare and you can't speak. But then I felt an angel
holding me, so very gentle. I thought, 'Well, if I've died, this isn't
so awful.'"
Long before the eponymous television show, my mom, recovering from her
fourth brain surgery, was touched by an angel. To understand the sweet
relief of that "not so awful," you'd have to live the life of a late-stage
brain cancer patient, straddling the border between madness and pain.
But then one of her nurses told us my mother might not have been hallucinating
her angel: sometimes volunteers connected with the hospital did conduct
"touch therapy" on patients after surgery. Since the therapy wasn't considered
an official medical procedure, however, the angel never showed up on my
mother's chart.
Elliot Greene recalls a time
when massage wasn't just "unofficial," it was contraindicated for cancer
patients: "In the past, textbooks would explicitly state that massage
would break up and spread malignant tumors." As a former president of
the American Massage Therapy Association, Greene concedes that most critics
fear vigorous, Swedish-style workouts, but adds that "these days, massage
therapists can work in conjunction with physicians to modify their techniques,
providing gentle relief for patients in pain."
For Robert Schmehr, "who gets
to touch the patient" is as much a social issue as it is a medical one.
Schmehr, manager of complementary Therapy at the HIV/AIDS Center of St.
Luke's-Roosevelt, coordinates the efforts of 30 massage therapists who
volunteer time with over 200 patient per month. The standard treatment
is one hour of Shiatsu (a Japanese word meaning "finger pressure"), twice
* monthly, combined with Reiki (a laying on of hands) and hatha yoga.
Schmehr notes that as patients report reduced protease inhibitor side
effects, "we've had four doctors approach us to be initiated as Reiki
practitioners themselves."
Michael Alatriste, founder and educational director of New York's Ibiki-ken
Center for Spiritual Health and Healing, is one of the few official providers
for Oxford's special alternative medicine rider. For the past two years
he's been using Reiki with several cancer patients who have Hodgkin's
lymphoma and ovarian and cervical cancers. Alatriste reports, "My clients
and I have about a 95 per cent success rate." Like many body workers,
Alatriste concedes that his definition of "success" may not be the same
as that of The New England Journal of Medicine: "Hospitals can't always
acknowledge that for each person, success and healing mean something different.
For some, it's remission. For others, it's coming to grips emotionally
with life. People who have cancer are remarkably strong, just to host
their condition. I help them to see their strength."
Most touch therapists warn against thinking of body work as a cure-all;
as Robert Schmehr puts it, "If you have AIDS in New York City, no amount
of massage is going to take away all your pain." Touching certainly didn't
save my mother's life, but it did allow her to die with the convictions
that she was divine and that she was loved. I'd like to think my brothers
and I helped, but I know in some way, it was the angel who showed her
how to do that.
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