Dr. Li Interviews Shea Beider: Coherence and Intuition in the Healing of Critically Ill Children

A Catalyst for Healing: Creating Energetic Fields for the Critically Ill to Access the Immaterial

We don't have to exclude one dimension of our being. We can be holistic, meaning we can have a mystical side and a spiritual side and a revelatory side. We can also have science and learning and foundations of knowing in this physical world through randomized, controlled clinical trials, etc.... It is an embodiment of the polarities. It is a whole reality.

Shay Beider had a moment of clarity while still a pre-med college student at UCLA. Shadowing doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and watching a girl tremble with fear before surgery, she suddenly awakened: “It doesn’t have to look like this.” Shay realized she could serve children and their families with something she’d already been delivering—healing touch. To put herself through college, Beider had been working as a massage therapist. Why not bring gentle, caring touch directly into healthcare?

Beider would eventually create a new therapeutic approach called Integrative Touch Therapy -- providing hands-on therapies for kids, as well as supporting families and communities at little or no cost to the families. Since its founding in 2005, her organization has become a leader in pediatric integrative medicine. The future of healthcare, according to Beider, is where “high tech and high touch meet.”

Integrative Touch for Kids (ITK) has been featured in the Washington Post and on ABC, NBC, and PBS, among other media outlets. ITK’s impacts have been measured to show significant decreases in pain, fear, and anxiety, as well as increases in overall well-being, self-efficacy, and relationships.