WASHINGTON - Summer camps just for kids with chronic diseases are booming — places to learn about epilepsy or finally meet someone else with Tourette's tics or slice open a cow's heart to see what's wrong with their own.
Now fledgling research suggests such special camps may offer more than a rite of passage these children otherwise would miss: They just might have a lasting therapeutic value.
It's work that helps explain why children's hospitals increasingly are sponsoring disease-specific summer camps. One in the nation's capital actually integrated the camps into the neurology department.
"How do you live well with a chronic condition? I believe in part, the power of being amongst your peers normalizes the experience," explains Sandra Cushner-Weinstein, a social worker at Children's National Medical Center who founded the hospital's weeklong camps for five illnesses, and is studying the impact on campers
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