The Experience of Shiatsu for Care Partners and Persons Living With Dementia: a Qualitative Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Dementia is a progressive neurological condition that affects over 50 million people. It impacts quality of life for those diagnosed, their care partners, and the relationship between the two. Strategies to enhance quality of life and relationships are needed. Shiatsu may improve care partners' well-being. Using touch through shiatsu may offer a meaningful way for care partners to interact with their partners living with dementia. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore care partners' experience of using both self-shiatsu and shiatsu with their partner, as well as to explore care partners' perceptions of the impact of shiatsu on the quality of their relationship. Setting: This study took place at a centre providing programs for persons living with dementia and their care partners. Participants: Participants were current and former attendees of the centre's programs. Research Design: This was a qualitative study with an interpretive/descriptive approach. Care partners were taught self-shiatsu to manage stress and a simplified, short shiatsu routine to use with their partner. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to elicit care partners' experiences and explore their ongoing use of shiatsu at two and six weeks post-workshop. Findings: Four care partners completed the study. A wide range of experiences with shiatsu were described, representing four key themes: Enhanced Awareness, Integrating Shiatsu into the Relationship, Barriers and Facilitators, and Potential and Possibility. Two found self-shiatsu beneficial. Using shiatsu with their partner was a favourable experience for only one, who found it a pleasant way to connect and interact. None of the participants felt using shiatsu with their partners affected their relationship quality. Conclusions: The findings of this study are inconclusive. Self-shiatsu may be a helpful self-management approach for some care partners, but not for others. Shiatsu for persons living with dementia may not fit into the routines of many care partners. For others, however, it may offer a means to connect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".