The Americans have given us some great things - trick or treating, Beavis and Butthead, the Baldwin brothers and pop tarts. But the latest import may actually be a good one.
In 2001, in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre bombings UK massage therapist and aromatherapist Kim Wooldridge received an e-mail from an online aromatherapist group asking whether she could supply aromatherapy oils to New York's emergency workers. Woolridge decided that she could do more and, following online enquiries, she was put in touch with a team from North Carolina, working with them to offer short massages to the emergency services.
"It was a very powerful experience", says Woolridge: "We worked with firefighters mainly, but also with police and social workers. Everybody was asking us "Do you have teams like this back in the UK?". So when I got back I started making enquiries and nobody had heard of such a thing."
In 2002 Woolridge set up Response Emergency Stress Team (Rest) UK. Now 40-strong, the team consists of trained volunteers, all of whom are certified massage therapists. The first live incident they attended was the fire at Atherstone last year, which claimed the lives of four of the 200 firemen attending it. When the team arrived, the fire services had already been there for three days trying to find the bodies of their colleagues.
According to Hampshire fireman Simon Foster, the massage helped: "People who haven't experienced it may see it as a bit of a luxury, but it enables you to carry on, to feel like you can go back and do the work again. We were doing 12-hour shifts, and it was fairly arduous. [After a massage] you stand up and you feel rejuvenated. You walk out of there and you feel like a new person."
The only surprising thing about providing onsite massages for the emergency services is that it hasn't been done in the UK before. When we can provide Indian head massages for tired beancounters, surely we can do so for those in the front line, dealing with life and death situations and witnessing incidents that the rest of us can barely imagine.
