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Gathering Evidence

Smith finished the week inspired. She returned to Gainesville and told Dean about her camp experiences. They took their “What if” game up a notch: What if they could prove that massage helps these kids? As a nurse, Dean understood that the medical profession loves concrete proof. “I wondered how we could put the results in language that the doctors would understand and appreciate,”  she says.

So Smith began planning the Camp Amigo Project—a study to prove that massage helps burn survivors. Diane Garrison, BA, LMT, a student at the Florida School of Massage and a burn survivor, jumped on board. She had grant writing experience and helped Smith to complete an already partially written grant, which was submitted to the Massage Therapy Foundation. The foundation awarded the Camp Amigo Project a grant of approximately $5,000 in 2006.

Two other Florida School of Massage students, Rachel Torres and Dana Rubin, joined the team as well. Smith then combined forces with Annie Morien, PhD, a physician assistant, licensed massage therapist and part-time instructor at the Florida School of Massage. Morien’s research interest, coincidentally, was keloid and burn scars. She helped them with the language and research protocol of the study, and with writing up the results for—they hoped—publication in a scientific journal.

Together, Morien and Smith wrote an objective: “To determine if therapeutic massage intervention produced clinically meaningful changes in range of motion and keloid size/shape in children ages 8 to 18.”

The four therapists—Morien stayed at home and would receive the results upon their return—headed to Camp Amigo in July 2006. In the medical cabin they shared with the other medical personnel, Smith and Rubin massaged eight children three to five times a week for approximately 30 minutes, while Torres and Garrison measured the range of motion, mood and circumference of scars. (The control was the same child but a different area of the body.)

They ran into a few kinks. First, they realized that scar circumference was tough to measure in camp conditions. Sun, for example, can cause keloids to pucker. Mood was difficult to measure as well. “Because the kids were at camp, they came in a happy mood and left in a happy mood,” says Morien.

However, range of motion was a slam dunk. “Range of motion was significantly increased from the first day of camp to the last day,” says Morien. In fact, she was surprised at how quickly it increased.

The non-clinical results also wowed Smith and her colleagues. “There was one little girl who had been burned in a house fire—they were using candles in the home because they didn’t have electricity—and this little girl tried to save several siblings,” says Smith. In doing so, she received burns over 85 percent of her body, including her face and hands.

“She didn’t want to be touched,” says Smith. “She was very guarded about anyone getting into her personal space.” However, by the end of the week, Smith says, the young girl was complaining because she had to get off the massage table.

The tangible results were two-to-three degree change in range of motion each day. The intangibles were great, too. “What a wonderful turnaround! It seemed to make a difference not just in the scars, but in her heart healing, and in her body image and perception of herself.”

For Garrison, who had been the same age as many of the children at camp when she had been burned over 65 percent of her body at age 11, going to camp was a revelation. “I went to massage school to specifically help other burn survivors,” she says, but didn’t know where to find them. “Once burn survivors are through with critical [care], they just kind of disappear,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is my tribe.’ I’ve been looking for this my whole life,” she says.

Garrison was thrilled with the results. “You kind of feel that you are your deformities, your scars,” she says. “And when somebody touches you lovingly where you have horrible scars that others are repelled by, it goes beyond anything that you may be doing physically to the skin…that’s what these kids were saying.”

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