192 pages paperback with black and white photographs

New, revised and updated edition.

This book is for people who feel comfortable communicating through their hands and for those who wish to feel more ease in transmitting care through touch. It is for people whose responsibility or job or gift is to oversee or to help take care of the elderly and ill members of our society. It is for sons and daughters caring for aging parents with physical impairments that effect a role reversal in a lifetime of relating. It is for the courageous men and women who continue caring for spouses or mothers or fathers with dementia related diseases such as Alzheimer's after such a disease has robbed that loved one of the ability to remember the relationship he or she once shared with the caregiver. It is for companions and family members struggling and sometimes sacrificing to provide care for their loved ones at home.

This book is for doctors who have forgotten or never learned that touch is medicine and for those who are wise enough to know that a five-second hug, offered as a gesture of shared humanity, can often do more to assuage fear and anxiety than a five-minute lecture. It is for nurses and nursing assistants who, once trained in giving back rubs to hospitalized patients to reduce discomfort and induce sleep, in current care systems may be more often in contact with equipment than with people, or spend most of their time dispensing medicines and completing paperwork. It is for the restorative aids, the occupational and physical and recreational therapists in extended care facilities who are searching for more effective and affirming ways of relating to those whom they serve. It is for hospice professionals and volunteers, hired companions, geriatric consultants, guardians, home health aids and others who want to help improve quality of life for their charges and clients. It is for chaplains and social workers and grief counselors who wish to reclaim the power of intentional touch in ministering to the frail, the distraught and the bereaved. It is for massage therapy students desiring to build careers in arenas that combine service with professional and personal growth and for practitioners whose hearts and hands lead them to forge new paths in venues where their skills are sorely needed. It is for anyone who wishes to use touch more consciously and compassionately in relating to the elderly, the ill and the dying.