C. Anderson Aldrich Award Winner:
Karen Olness, M.D. FAAP
John Kennell, M.D. FAAP, Cleveland, OH
Creating a new modality for the treatment of children and adolescents and devoting a
professional career to helping children locally, nationally, and globally are strong
qualifications for the C. Anderson Aldrich Award in Child Development.
Dr. Olness has more than met the measure of "outstanding work in the area of child
health and human development" and made "contributions that have advanced the
ultimate objectives of the American Academy of Pediatrics. In her career she recognized
the potential of biofeedback and self-hypnosis to help pediatricians benefit children. She
studied and developed its applications, tested it carefully to increase its range of
effectiveness and then humbly and generously shared this remarkable method through journal
articles, books, and in countless national and international workshops.
Karen Olness had a solid biomedical research background and seven years abroad living
and working in third world settings when she started her academic career at George
Washington University, documenting the ability of young children to learn self-regulation
techniques for pain control and treatment of habit problems. At Minneapolis
Children’s Medical Center in 1975, she was the first pediatrician to implement a
systematic team approach to help children with cancer address issues of pain and anxiety.
She taught many workshops on non-pharmacological approaches to pain and stress
reduction for children with chronic diseases and their families. She emphasized the
importance of interventions to enhance the sense of coping and mastery in these children.
This was an exciting innovation. Instead of the traditional doing something to the
child, she demonstrated partnership with the youngster so that he or she would
experience the joy of mastery.
This different approach to pediatric care is a pleasant change for both the physician
and the child. Since then, a majority of children’s hospitals in the United States
have adopted formal programs to help children who have painful chronic conditions or who
must endure repeated painful procedures. Dr. Olness and her colleagues in Minnesota also
documented the ability of children and adolescents to intentionally control several
autonomic responses, and, more than 20 years ago, they began examining the possibility
that children could demonstrate voluntary immunomodulation.
The work which documented the ability of children to change salivary immunoglobulin A
via relaxation techniques has been replicated and expanded to demonstrate a reduction in
upper-respiratory infections among children who learn relaxation and stress reduction
methods (Hewson-Bower).
Her work with chronically ill children has long included a focus on children with
migraine. She and her colleagues demonstrated a significant reduction in number of
migraine episodes among children who learned self-hypnosis and biofeedback. Others also
have replicated this work. Dr. Olness is an excellent clinician frequently identifying
organic disease that has caused the presenting symptoms.
Throughout her career Dr. Olness has continued to work as a clinician, especially with
children who have chronic illnesses and habit problems. Six years ago she worked with
computer engineers to develop a child oriented biofeedback program that enables children
to learn that changes in their thinking result in immediate changes in body responses. In
1998 this program was modified into a CD-ROM which can be used in home computers by
children and their families.
Dr. Olness has continued her commitment to international child health. She developed an
orientation to international health seminar that she has offered for 25 years to students
and colleagues contemplating volunteer rotations abroad. And she herself has continued to
volunteer frequently for overseas missions.
With her husband and four children, she spent six months as a volunteer in a Lao
refugee camp in NE Thailand in 1980. During this period she did the first major
anthropometric survey of child growth in Southeast Asia. She is the author of a manual for
physicians and physician’s assistants, Practical Pediatrics in Developing
Countries, revised and used around the world for 30 years.
Her experiences in the third world led to her commitment to train young child health
professionals in the United States to become international child health specialists. In
1989 at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, she started the first formal
pediatric residency training program with an international track.
From her overseas experiences and witnessing that the special needs of children are
generally ignored in complex humanitarian emergencies, she established an annual training
program in "Complex Humanitarian Emergencies: Focus on Children and Families,"
which has been offered during the past four years.
Dr. Olness has been active in Uganda for the past 17 years, first to rehabilitate a
large community health center as part of Minnesota International Health Volunteers, an NGO
(non-governmental organization) founded by Dr. Olness and colleagues. She began doing AIDS
research in Uganda in 1988. This has included studies on maternal-infant transmission of
HIV, neurodevelopmental consequences of being born to an HIV-infected mother, and the
effects of chloroquine on HIV. Many young Ugandan physicians and students have been
trained in AIDS, research methods, and pediatrics as part of this ongoing program.
In 1991 Dr. Olness and her husband began a volunteer faculty development project in
Laos. This has now led to establishment of a pediatric residency-training program for
doctors in Laos, a country with more than two million children and only six pediatricians
when the training program began. The six Lao pediatricians lead this program with
extensive help from long and short-term volunteer pediatricians from the United States and
Thailand.
Dr. Olness has been President of several national academic organizations including the
Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. She is the co-founder of two active
volunteer organizations, Health Frontiers and the Minnesota International Health
Volunteers.
Perhaps due to her early experiences with the difficulties of farm life and growing up
with a younger sister with severe asthma, Dr. Olness demonstrates a rare level of
perceptiveness and concern for others. Dr. Olness can often be found reaching out to an
unhappy child, a depressed secretary or a faculty member unfairly criticized.
She is a quiet, effective pediatrician who leads by example, always volunteering to
help. In her efforts on behalf of children, she is courageous, strong, indefatigable, and
never daunted. Her innovative ideas are typically well ahead of current general knowledge
and practice. Few have been as deserving of recognition as Dr. Olness.
Publications by Dr. Olness
Karen Olness, Daniel P. Kohen. (1999) Hypnosis and
Hypnotherapy With Children (Guilford Press, NY)  |
