Children's Hospital Pain Clinic Is A Playroom For Kids

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) - It looks like a large playroom, but it's actually a floor in a local hospital.

Children's Hospital in Minneapolis opened a pain clinic unlike any in the country.

You might recognize the names behind the new center.

Horst Rechelbacher, founder of Aveda cosmetics, and his widow and business partner, Kiran Stordalen, gave $1.5 million to the project, which integrates aromatherapy and massage into treating kids dealing with pain.

If you didn't know any better, you might mistake it for a spa or a fun house.

And that is exactly the point.

Dr. Stefan Friedrichsdorf is the medical director of the department of pain medicine, palliative care and integrated medicine at Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.

"A typical hospital room, a typical clinic room--it's just awful," he said. "There's nothing you can do in there. It's dangerous for them, and you come in this room and you just feel, 'Ahhhhh.'"

If anyone can appreciate the doctor's vision realized it's 8-year-old Kali's mom, Janice Eason.

"It's just amazing we can have a space like this for kids like her and families to just experience this," she said.

Kali, who underwent a lung transplant, has been treated at the clinic for years, but now it has a whole new look and smell thanks to Rechelbacher and Stordalen.

"He'd be so thrilled and so impressed," Stordalen said of her late husband. "This is exactly the kind of work I think he saw for his future."

The clinic combines aromatherapy and massage with pain psychology and play.

Fifth-grader Caroline Marshall is a graduate of the center.

The integrative techniques worked to lessen her chronic leg pain.

"It was like throbbing pain, burning pain, any pain you can think of," she said.

Marshall said she even had fun in the new sensory room. It's a room designed to stimulate all the senses for children with special needs.

"Senses like touching, like smell, like listening, like hearing, and being interactive, being able to actually control the world is for many of those children something ever so amazing," Friedrichsdorf said.

Some of the patients at this clinic have pain issues like headaches. Others are sick with cancer and some are even getting end-of-life care.