Study to Determine Therapeutic Massage Dosing to Improve Quality of Life in Hospitalized Patients Receiving Palliative Care

Palliative care (PC) provides expert symptom management and communication skills for patients and families facing serious life-limiting illness in the hospital. Many such patients experience lower quality of life (QOL) due to moderate-severe pain or other symptoms and require strong pharmacotherapies - often controlled substances such as opioids or benzodiazepines - to alleviate associated distress. A major tenet of quality supportive care is the combination of many types of therapy, both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic. Patients with serious life-limiting illnesses often rely on the use of nonpharmacologic therapies to manage pain or other symptoms at home. However, implementing complementary therapies in the hospital setting can be challenging and thus they are rarely available for hospitalized patients with serious illness. Patients often request non-drug options, but medications remain the mainstay of treating pain while hospitalized.

Therapeutic massage is the most common non-traditional treatment option offered to improve quality of life, provide comfort and decrease pain in hospice and palliative care settings outside the hospital. Nevertheless, there remains limited data describing the impact of therapeutic massage in hospitalized patients receiving palliative care.

Additionally, in the hospital setting, the logistical challenges of providing massage therapy include a number of setting-specific factors. A massage therapy session may be interrupted by care being provided by other members of the team, by personal visitors, or by the activities of his/her roommate in a semi-private room. Also, the availability of massage therapy may be such that a patient's session time is limited because of the high demand on the short amount of time a non-integrated, contracted massage therapist has to see multiple patients. Given the remarkable negative impact on QOL experienced by patients hospitalized with a serious progressive illness, a nationwide opioid crisis in the setting of public concern for untreated pain, and patient demand for integrative therapies, we wish to investigate non-traditional methods of supporting patients in pain and providing clinicians with viable alternatives. Unfortunately, very little is known about optimal delivery of massage interventions in the hospital setting, including dosing parameters such as time and frequency.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of different massage dosing strategies on QOL, symptom management, and satisfaction in hospitalized patients already receiving PC consultation.