Healing Touch: A Heart-Centered Practice
Healing Touch: A Heart-Centered Practice
By Mary B. Johnson, RN, PhD, HNC, CHTP
Energy-based therapies are becoming more common in today’s health care system. Many people view the need to actively participate in their own healing processes as essential. According to Eisenberg’s latest survey, 42% of Americans use some form of alternative or complementary therapy.1 People see this involvement as a means of active participation in their own health. Healing touch (HT) is based on the similar principles of self-healing and its practitioners are deeply committed to empowering their clients in the process.
Basic Assumptions of Healing Touch
Healing arts practitioners have long understood the importance of caring, gentle touch as a crucial factor in attaining a positive response from those who are ill. Nursing, as a profession, has embraced the belief that gentle touch is a manifestation of caring, a means of demonstrating its most heartfelt values. HT expands on this belief and the means of expressing it by providing a framework that empowers its practitioners and facilitates the healing process of patients.
HT is defined as an energy-based therapeutic approach that influences the healing potential of another person. HT is an umbrella term used to identify a number of energy-based healing techniques, including therapeutic touch (TT); concepts and interventions described by Brugh Joy, MD, Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere, and Barbara Brennan, MA; and the original HT techniques of Janet Mentgen, RN, BSN. HT em-braces a holistic philosophy, represents a means of caring, and is considered a sacred healing art that focuses on repatterning, balancing, and righting the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. HT requires a calm, centered focus and a clear intent to serve with compassion and caring. HT creates a healing environment of relaxation, wholeness, harmony, and right relationship.
Mechanism of Action
Perceiving the human body as an energy field, or as a network of energy fields interfacing with other fields within the environment, has been explored and summarized in a wide variety of books related to healing.2-4 HT recognizes a person’s energy field as the essence of life, reflecting both health and illness within its field. The human energy field includes three parts: the aura, layers or levels of energy in the human field; the chakras, energy centers within the body; and meridians, energy tracts that guide the flow of body energy throughout the field. This is the same energy field that acupuncture, acupressure, reflexology, and zone therapy use to restore the flow of energy through the body.5
The Process of Healing Touch
The balance, vitality, and wholeness of the energy system affect health and quality of life. It is this energy system that the HT practitioner connects with and modulates in order to influence the healing process. The result is the development of a synergistic relationship in which both practitioner and patient experience the presence of universal energy, the source of healing.
All HT techniques begin with centering, the state achieved when one moves within oneself to an inner reference of stability. To be centered implies a quality and essence of being present in the moment. After centering, the practitioner assesses the patient’s energy field using all perceptive senses, including intuition. The hands are used as tools to sense the field and to modulate energy. The practitioner identifies patterns of energy congestion, blockage, constriction, imbalance, fullness, and vibration and shares these impressions with the patient. Then to facilitate energy balancing and flow, the practitioner uses a variety of techniques, some of which involve direct touch and others that use a non-contact form of energy modulation.
HT sessions may also include guided visual imagery and the use of music to help the patient become centered and open to the process. Sessions may vary from 10-60 minutes depending on the mutual need and time frame of the patient and practitioner. Closure involves reassessing the field as well as any change in the patient’s affect. Allowing the patient to rest quietly after a session is a wonderful way to ensure deep relaxation.
The focus of HT is to facilitate the healing process in whatever way that process manifests for the patient. Its effects are perceived individually and are akin to creating the relaxation response in most people.
Evidence
Since HT has roots in TT and other healing strategies derived from laying on of hands, research in these areas constitutes the groundwork for research in energy-based healing. Easter’s integrative review of the literature explored the state of research regarding TT.6 She found research reports meeting the standards for primary research but needing more rigorous research methodologies. Similarly, Winstead-Fry noted that TT research has been ongoing for 25 years with great diversity in research questions, study design, methods of data collection, and outcomes measures.7
In 1995, Slater found that patients with chronic malignant abdominal pain received relief with HT.8 In another study, Silva reported significantly improved recovery and activity levels and less narcotic analgesia and bowel treatments in patients who received HT following abdominal hysterectomy.9
In a recent study of a specialty form of HT, six of 10 patients received some long-term relief from their chronic pain; one patient reported a change in chronic depression; another no longer feared heights.10
Research projects reported at the January 2000 Healing Touch Conference in Kauai, Hawaii, included outcome studies on the use of HT for back injuries, mastectomy pain, coronary artery bypass surgery, agitation in dementia patients, and patients undergoing flexible sigmoidoscopy. Efficacy and safety related studies are currently in process.
Though research for energy-based healing is in its infancy, evidence for decreasing anxiety, promoting the relaxation response, relieving pain, and accelerating wound healing has been increasing.11
To facilitate data collection on the efficacy of HT, Sister Rita Jean DuBrey developed a simple performance improvement tool that looks at the perceived effectiveness of HT treatments on four indicators: stress reduction, pain reduction, emotional well-being, and spiritual well-being.12 This tool can be used in conjunction with a quality assurance study to provide administrators information on the value patients place on HT treatments.
Reimbursement
The legal basis for HT practice is the same as for manual and biofield interventions. As yet there is no standard mechanism for insurance reimbursement. However, the nursing diagnosis "energy field disturbance," now included in the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association list, gives acceptance and credibility to the practice of HT within the nursing discipline.
The Healing Touch Certificate Program
Janet Mentgen, an energy-based health care practitioner since 1980, developed the Healing Touch Certificate Program. The program was first offered in 1989 at the University of Tennessee. It became a certificate program of the American Holistic Nurses Association in 1990. By 1999, there were 1,021 certified practitioners and 146 certified instructors. This year, 203 workshops covering various levels of HT will be offered throughout the continental United States, Hawaii, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most critical outcome of the use of HT in nursing practice is the transformation that occurs among the nurses who practice it. The HT educational process requires that we come to know ourselves in a deep, reflective way. It requires that we learn to center ourselves, be clear about our intention, withhold judgment, and see others with an open, respectful, and loving heart. In the educational process we experience the powerful art of journaling, discover how to get in touch with our creative self-expression, and learn how to deal effectively with the shadow side of ourselves. We also learn to be more aware of our non-verbal communication and the powerful impact we have on our patients’ environments. We learn how to create a healing environment and to do what is necessary to, as Florence Nightingale so aptly said, ". . . put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him." It is the personal rediscovery of the self that can then empower the place in which we work to become a true place of healing.
References
1. Eisenberg DM, et al. Trends in alternative medicine use in the United States, 1990-1997: Results of a follow-up national survey. JAMA 1998;280:1569-1575.
2. Gerber R. Vibrational Medicine: New Choices for Healing Ourselves. Sante Fe, NM: Bear & Co.; 1988.
3. Hover-Kramer D, ed. Healing Touch: A Resource for Health Care Professionals. Albany, NY: Delmar Publishers; 1996.
4. Newman MA. Health as Expanding Consciousness. 2nd ed. New York: National League for Nursing Press; 1994.
5. Slater V. Healing Touch. In: Micozzi MS, ed. Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. New York: Churchill Livingstone Inc.; 1997.
6. Easter A. The state of research on the effects of therapeutic touch. J Holist Nurs 1997;15:158-175.
7. Winstead-Fry P, Kijek J. An integrative review and meta-analysis of therapeutic touch research. Altern Ther Health Med 1999;5:58-67.
8. Slater V. Toward an understanding of energetic healing, parts 1 and 2: Energetic structures and energetic processes. J Holist Nurs 1995;13:209-238.
9. Silva MA. Conference abstracts: The effect of relaxation touch on the recovery level of postanesthesia abdominal hysterectomy patients [abstr]. Altern Ther 1996;2:94.
10. Wardell D. The trauma release technique: How it is taught and experienced in healing touch. Altern Complement Ther 2000;6:20-27.
11. Hutchison C. Healing touch research update: A simple yet powerful tool. Healing Touch Newsletter 1999;9:6-7.
12. Hutchison C. Healing touch research resources. Healing Touch Newsletter 1999;9:1.
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