Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #118489

Adriaan Visser, PhD¹, Machteld Van den Berg, MA¹, Alexandra Schoolmeesters, MA¹, Petra Edelman, Nurse², and Bart Van den Borne, PhD³. (1) Center for Psycho-oncology, Helen Dowling Institute, P.O. Box 85061, 3508 AB, Utrecht, Netherlands, 31-30-2524020, adriaan.visser@planet.nl, (2) Diakonessen Hospital, Prof. Lorentzlaan 76, 7307 HL, Zeist, Netherlands, (3) Department of Health Promotion, University of Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, Netherlands

People with cancer often seek complementary care due to the suffering from negligence of the bodily well-being during the intensive treatments. The purpose of this study is to gain insight in the evaluation of haptonomic massage and its effects on the well-being of cancer patients treated with chemotherapy in day care. The study has a pretest-posttest semi-experimental design, with 31 patients in the experimental group and 26 in the control group. Patients in the control group from other hospitals have been matched with patients in the experimental condition with respect to age, gender, type of cancer, type of chemotherapy, prognosis and the period between pretest and posttest. The intervention consisted of five haptotherapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Patients in the control condition received standard medical care. Standardized questionnaires were used measuring quality of life, mood, meaning of life, general functioning, symptoms, sleep quality, body awareness, and satisfaction with care. Patients highly valued the haptotherapy treatment, and were satisfied with the personal attention and the experienced relaxation. The haptotherapy treatment improves the general quality of life as well as the cognitive and social functioning of patients. It can be concluded that haptonomic massage positively contributes to the well-being of cancer patients during the period of chemotherapy. More rigorous experimental studies are necessary in this field.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to

• reason why health care providers should be more attention to the bodily well-being of their patients, and
• explain why massage is a valuable mean to introduce complementary medicine in hospitals.

Keywords: Alternative Medicine/Therapies, Cancer

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation