Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1013756
A B M P m e m b e r s e a r n F R E E C E a t w w w. a b m p . c o m / c e b y r e a d i n g M a s s a g e & B o d y w o r k m a g a z i n e 75 BUILDING A LEGACY By 1992, Field formally established the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine with the help of a start-up grant from Johnson & Johnson. According to the TRI website, "it was the first center in the world devoted solely to the study of touch and its application in science and medicine." And it's through TRI that the community's massage research literature grew exponentially when no one else was studying its effects. TRI is synonymous with Field, and rightly so. It's her baby. Out of TRI has come the extensive research we now take for granted. She says the most surprising effects of massage she's found along the way "was the increase in natural killer cells and natural killer cell activity that happened in our HIV and breast cancer massage studies. Those were significant findings as natural killer cells kill bacterial, viral, and cancer cells. That led us to our underlying mechanism studies, which showed that relaxing the nervous system by moving the skin reduces stress hormones like cortisol, which then leads to several effects like increased natural killer cells and increased serotonin—the body's natural anti-pain and antidepressant." Today, TRI's wellness center continues to teach the value of pediatric massage, and volunteers even take the work into the teaching hospital, showing parents of prematurely born infants how to touch their children for maximum health benefits. Field says she has written more than 100 grants over the lifetime of TRI, and once had great support for the work the institute was producing, including a lucrative grant from the National Institutes of Health. But times and administrations change, and now, TRI sits on the funding precipice. THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME In so many ways, massage therapy research has come a long way since Field's 1986 landmark study. Researchers are looking at the benefits of massage and touch therapies at an ever-increasing rate, the public consumes more massage than ever before, and the legitimacy of this once-maligned therapy can no longer be disputed, and yet, Field says the financial challenges for researchers studying massage remain largely the same as when she first started out. How hard was it to get funding for massage therapy research in those early days of TRI's work? "Impossible," she says, "and it still is." While the affiliation with the university is critical to her work, it does not provide any monetary support for TRI. With important funding sources drying up, Field worries that TRI might soon have to shutter its efforts. It takes approximately $100,000 a year to keep the TRI doors open, and while funding used to come from the National Institutes of Health, Johnson & Johnson, and even the Massage Therapy Foundation and Massage Envy corporate headquarters, those sources for TRI have vanished. "The message is still not heard," she says of the lack of resources devoted to this research. "It is going to take a lot more than our research to get the message out there." But the problem, she says, comes from within. Field, shown here massaging a baby in a neonatal intenstive care unit, says you have to really move the skin to see growth weight improvements.