Key Point

• Palliative care is an added layer of support for people living with chronic or serious illness. It enhances people’s care by offering quality of life for them and their family. And your touch can make a difference in all their lives.

The most common reason people become massage therapists is the desire to help people. Other top reasons are the flexible hours, the variety of clients, and the uniqueness of each session. 

What if I told you none of that has to change when you expand your massage therapy skills into the palliative care space? You could ease the suffering of your fellow humans in a variety of settings. You could continue to have flexibility in how and where you work. You could expand your work in your community, work in people’s homes, or in hospitals and clinics. And you could make a measurable difference in the lives of people living with chronic and serious illnesses.

This is what it’s like to be a massage therapist with palliative care skills. The way I look at it, palliative care is like chocolate. Everything goes with chocolate, right? Most massage therapists are surprised to learn that their brand, technique, and approach to massage therapy already work with palliative care. It’s simply a way to grow what you do and the kind of support you can offer.

Palliative care is an added layer of support for people living with chronic or serious illness. (It’s not hospice. We’ll address that another time.) Palliative care enhances a person’s current care by focusing on quality of life for them and their family.¹ Isn’t that what you do already? 

You are not the only health-care provider that your clients see. Most of your clients get some care from someone else, whether it’s primary care, chiropractic care, or physical therapy. Your work enhances that care, even if you never hear about it or don’t think about it. 

Building Awareness

There are millions of people in the US who aren’t benefiting from palliative care, in large part because they don’t know it exists or what it could do for them. Still, others are simply exhausted by the idea of “one more doctor’s appointment.” But what if they could start their palliative journey with you? People living with diabetes, lung disease, chronic kidney disease, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression, anxiety, or other mental health challenges, or people recovering from a stroke may find their way to your table and could benefit from the skills of a palliative-trained massage therapist. 

Palliative care is not a new path. It’s a broader path. With the right training, you can invite many people into a type of care they never imagined, with little (if any) change to the techniques you already use in your massage practice. When people are diagnosed with a serious illness, they report a marked decrease in satisfaction with the kind of care they receive. Most negative health-care experiences are due to a mix of:

• discrimination
• lack of empathy
• poor communication/listening skills
• frustration/anxiety navigating and dealing with the health-care system 
• disregard for the individual’s mental health and overall well-being.² 

“Just being nicer” to those clients won’t change this, but a palliative care perspective and related skills could make all the difference. By learning some essential pieces of information about these diseases and some specialized communication and collaboration skills, your treatment space could become an important site of compassionate care for people living with serious illness, and you and any therapists who work with you could change the daily experience of illness for people and their families. 

Growth in Palliative Care

Palliative care was officially recognized as a specialty area of practice in 2006, but the imperative for all care providers to have a working knowledge of the foundational skills that differentiate palliative care from what’s often called curative treatment has become clear in recent years. The nation’s palliative care organizations agree that “equipping all clinicians with foundational palliative care competencies (serious illness communication, illness trajectory and symptom management, collaborative care, and psychosocial/spiritual care, to name a few) is essential to address the complex needs of the growing number of adults living with chronic, progressive, or life-threatening serious illness.”³ When these organizations make these assertions, they’re talking about doctors, social workers, nurses . . . and us. We are clinicians. I know they’re talking about us because they’re talking about anyone who provides any kind of care for “the growing number of adults living with chronic, progressive, or life-threatening serious illness.” It’s time to start noticing that people living with these conditions are already our clients and our clients’ loved ones.

We’ve all heard about the workforce shortage in health care, and the conversation about this shortage is shifting. The first thing that needs to happen is a move away from the idea that doctors are always the first point of contact for people living with illness. People are often diagnosed by a doctor, but then many other care team members join together (in the same location or not) to provide the care they receive related to that illness. Currently, massage therapists are not a very big part of that equation in reality or in the minds of health-care decision-makers, but we can be part of the solution to the workforce shortage. It’s on us to show up to meet this need. 

Notes

1. National Institute on Aging, “What Are Palliative Care and Hospice Care?” accessed November 24, 2023, www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-are-palliative-care-and-hospice-care.

2. Massachusetts Coalition for Serious Illness Care, “2020–2021 Public Experience Research Findings,” accessed November 24, 2023, www.maseriouscare.org/sites/g/files/csphws2336/files/2021-12/MCSIC-2020-2021-Public-Experience-Research-Findings.pdf.

3. Brook A. Calton et al., “An Interprofessional Primary Palliative Care Curriculum for Health Care Trainees and Practicing Clinicians,” Palliative Medicine Reports 3, no. 1 (2022): 80–6, www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/pmr.2021.0074.

The Rub

Check out Healwell’s new podcast, The Rub, where hosts Cal Cates and Corey Rivera explore issues related to palliative care and massage therapy, health care and massage therapy, and all things clinical massage therapy. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.