You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Uncategorized' category.
More than 30 years ago the United States began embracing the theory, clinical practice and research of ancient Asian medical practices including non-contact therapeutic touch (NCTT). Now, according to a study at the University of Missouri, researchers discovered that 73 percent of patients receiving NCTT experienced a significant reduction in pain, had fewer requests for medication, and slept more comfortably following surgery.
An intentionally directed process of energy modulation to promote healing, NCTT allows practitioners to channel life energy through their hands to patients in a four-phase process. The four phases – centering, assessment, “unruffling” the field and intervention – allow a restoration of balance that enables ailing individuals to heal themselves. However, acceptance of the ideas that the human body is an energy-producing organism and that energy can be directed to benefit health is critical said Guy McCormack, lead researcher for the study and chair of the Department of Occupational Therapy and Occupational Science in the MU School of Health Professions.
In order to discover the effectiveness of NCTT, McCormack studied 90 patients receiving occupational therapy post-surgery and divided them into an experimental group where non-contact therapeutic touch therapy was given, a placebo group where a metronome acted as the treatment, and a control group where the participants did not receive any form of rehabilitation. When describing non-contact therapeutic touch, McCormack said the process involves physics and human energy fields.
“There seems to be some subliminal aspects we are not aware of that may have to do with the connectivity between people,” McCormack said. “People don’t question how you can text someone, transmit messages through computers, or visual images through televisions; thus the belief system is very powerful. If people believe that NCTT is going to be beneficial and are knowledgeable of it, it will be beneficial.”
While the participants receiving non-contact therapeutic touch had considerable reductions in pain, patients in the placebo and control groups experienced an increase in pain perception due to the mechanical intervention of the metronome and chance.
“Although it is difficult to introduce this form of therapy into medical settings, more and more hospitals are using complementary therapies like NCTT because consumers are interested in abandoning pharmacological solutions for pain, and instead are interested in harnessing their own capacity to heal through an inexpensive and cost-effective process,” McCormack said.
—————————-
Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
—————————-
Source: Christian Basi
University of Missouri-Columbia
Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/139338.p
Healing Touch: Acupuncture without the needles
Healing touch therapy is a complementary energy-based approach to healing. The goal of healing touch is to restore balance to the human energy system through a heart-centered relationship with the use of contact and non-contact touch. It is believed this balance can help the body in its natural ability to heal.
While healing touch is an alternative treatment, it is becoming more and more accepted at mainstream hospitals. One hospital that provides healing touch therapy is St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa, Fla.
Kimberly Gray is the head of the Healing Touch Program there. She’s a nurse who has used healing touch for three years with her patients. Her managers, doctors and other nurses started to notice what a difference healing touch had on the patients.
So, in 2004, the hospital gave her a chance to do healing touch 100 percent of the time and to track the results of her work.
Gray conducted a study with 140 patients at the hospital. The patients rated their pain, anxiety and nausea before and after the treatment. The study found the average pain score on a scale of zero to 10 decreased from an average of seven before healing touch treatments to two after healing touch treatments.
The data also shows a decrease in anxiety, nausea, and in some cases, a decrease in hospital length of stay-days. The data also shows an increase in overall patient satisfaction. The results were so impressive, the hospital began a healing touch program and named Kimberly as the head of it.
Healing touch is a bio-field therapy. It is described as being similar to acupuncture without the needles. The healing touch practitioner facilitates the healing process by clearing and balancing the bio-electromagnetic field surrounding the human body. The belief is all healing is self-healing, and the balance of energy helps the body achieve the greatest level of ability to heal.
Patients describe the experience as relaxing and a sense of warmth around them. Many patients experience a profound sense of relaxation following a healing touch therapy session.
Kimberly said some of her greatest allies are those who were first skeptical of healing touch therapy. She said with healing touch therapy, the person does not have to believe in it, but they have to be open to the experience. She said that in healing touch, they do not push the energy; they allow energy to flow through them for the greatest benefit to the patient. In her years as a healing touch practitioner, she has seen amazing results from her work. In one case, she helped a young man come out of a coma.
http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlin…=181997&SecID=2
<img src="
Do you fully understand the magnitude of stress on the work place environment?
A 2000 Integra survey reported:65% of workers said that workplace stress had caused difficulties & more than 10% described these as having major effects;
10% said they work in an atmosphere where physical violence has occurred because of job stress & in this group, 42% report that yelling & other verbal abuse is common;
- 29% had yelled at co-workers because of workplace stress, 14% said they work where machinery or equipment has been damaged because of workplace rage & 2% admitted that they had actually personally struck someone;
- 19% or almost one in five respondents had quit a previous position because of job stress & nearly one in four have been driven to tears because of workplace stress;
- 62% routinely find that they end the day with work-related neck pain, 44% reported stressed-out eyes, 38% complained of hurting hands & 34% reported difficulty in sleeping because they were too stressed-out;
- 12% called in sick because of job stress;
- Over half said they often spend 12-hour days on work related duties & an equal number frequently skip lunch because of the stress of job demands.
2000 Integra survey can be found at http://www.stress.org/job.htm
Below studies done on Healing Touch & it’s effectiveness in reducing stress:
A Persuasive Commentary & Study: Exploring Perception of HT Therapy as a Positive Treatment Modality for Wellness Maintenance, Physical & Psychological Concerns in Adults. Norma L. Garrett, MSW: The purpose of this 2006 study was to determine the perception of benefits of HT treatments in adults for physical & psychological concerns & maintaining health. Positive results from Healing Touch were perceived for physical problems & for psychological. No one perceived it as negative. For most the treatment was beyond expectations.
Perceived Effectiveness of Healing Touch Treatments: A Performance Improvement Study. Sr. Rita Jean DuBrey, CSJ, RN, MSN, CHTP/I:
This performance improvement study was conducted over a seven-week period. 20 clients received Healing Touch in a community based practice. Each participant was asked to complete a survey utilizing 4 indicators: stress reduction, pain reduction (if applicable); emotional well-being, & spiritual well-being. All participants reported a decrease in stress following treatment. The levels of stress were reduced for greater than 2 weeks by 40% of the participants followed by 4-7 days for 30% of the participants. For those 8 individuals who sought treatment for pain reduction they experienced a reduction in pain either for 1-2 weeks (50%) or 2 weeks (50%). Emotional well-being was reported to last for greater a minimum of a week for 50% of the sample. Spiritual well-being was reported by all but one of the subjects. The increase in spiritual well being lasted for 2 weeks for the majority of subjects (60%).
If you are a business owner & would like to to see how Healing Touch can benefit your office please contact me via email CaroleGrace@Gmail.com or by phone (586) 719-4582.
Embracing Alternative Care
Top hospitals put unorthodox therapies into practice
By Avery Comarow – US News
“To be blunt, if my wife and I didn’t think it was helping him, we wouldn’t have continued with it,” says Dan Polley. He’s talking about Mikey, the Polleys’ 2½-year-old in the next room, who was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia when he was 6 months old. Chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant have been crucial elements of Mikey’s treatment. But the “it” his father speaks of is nothing like these aggressive, costly, and heavily researched exemplars of western care—it is a kind of touch therapy, from the camp of alternative medicine. Gentle and benign, “healing touch” is intended to rebalance the energy field that its practitioners believe surrounds the body and flows through it along defined pathways, affecting health when disrupted. Several times a week, therapist Lynne Morrison spends 20 minutes unblocking and smoothing Mikey’s energy field, which energy healers like Morrison say they can feel and correct.
Before a recent session, Mikey was grouchy, drawing up his legs and issuing periodic yowls. His stomach hurt, said his father. But as the little boy nestled in his father’s arms and Morrison moved her hands around his body, lightly resting them here and then there, his tenseness loosened and he quieted for a few minutes at a time. The Polleys believe that the therapy not only calms their son but is aiding his return to health.
The setting for the unorthodox therapy—an academic medical center—would have been startling just five or 10 years ago. Morrison is on the staff of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, a hard-nosed, tough-cases, research-oriented emblem of western medicine. It perennially ranks among America’s premier hospitals and is the principal pediatric teaching hospital for Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. And Mikey is only one of many children there receiving care that not long ago was called alternative medicine. Now it is more often called CAM, for complementary and alternative medicine, or integrative medicine, to avoid the loaded “alternative.” The message the new labels are meant to convey is that the therapies more often go hand in hand with traditional medicine than substitute for it.
Children’s Memorial is just one of many academic hospitals where unconventional therapies have found a home. Elite centers like the Mayo Clinic, Duke University Medical Center, and the University of California-San Francisco now offer acupuncture, massage, and other CAM services. All 18 hospitals on U.S. News’s most recent “America’s Best Hospitals” superselective Honor Roll provide CAM of some type. Fifteen of the 18 also belong to the three-year-old Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, 36 U.S. teaching hospitals pushing to blend CAM with traditional care.
Thicket of therapies. Each center has its own notion of CAM and how best to fit it into the medical mix, which can be challenging. “There is rarely a consensus among CAM experts on the optimal product, dose, or intended users,” states a report from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health charged with doling out research funds and tidying the thicket of therapies deemed to fall within CAM’s broad reach.
At one extreme are found techniques such as yoga and massage, acknowledged by the most hard-line skeptics to have some benefit, if only to lower stress and anxiety. At the other are therapies that even many who applaud CAM’s newfound academic popularity call “woo-woo medicine” because of the sheer implausibility of their rationale. Homeopathy, which involves remedies often lacking a single molecule of active substance, is the poster child; some would add energy therapies such as healing touch. The broad middle takes in acupuncture, herbal medicine, and other CAM approaches that seem to benefit some people with certain conditions.
Until the mid-1990s, most academic centers treated CAM like a pack of scruffy mutts, noisy and unworthy of notice. A large pot of federal and foundation research funds—now close to $250 million per year just from NCCAM and the National Cancer Institute, plus tens of millions more from private donors such as the Bravewell Collaborative—helped turn that sniffy attitude into solicitous attention, says longtime CAM commentator Donald Marcus. “The funding gave them respect from the medical school community,” says Marcus, a professor of medicine and immunology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he has long taught a CAM course. A survey of hospitals found that 27 percent offered CAM in 2005, up from 8 percent in 1998. At the Cleveland Clinic, for example, NIH money is behind a clinical trial to see whether reiki, another energy therapy, can reduce stress and anxiety in prostate cancer patients.
The integrative medicine program at Children’s Memorial got off the ground in 2003 with $1.7 million in foundation seed money and is now chasing NIH grants. David Steinhorn, a pediatric intensivist and medical director of the hospital’s CAM program, says several privately funded trials, including Mikey’s, are underway or in the works. Steinhorn is a passionate champion of investigating CAM therapies, no matter how unlikely, if he believes they may help patients and are safe. “I’m a very serious, hard-core ICU doctor, but I have seen these therapies benefit my patients, even if I don’t know how,” he says.
Patient access. CAM’s ascendance isn’t entirely driven by money—researchers make frequent references to obligation. “We want patients to have access to these therapies in a responsible fashion,” says Lisa Corbin, medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Colorado Hospital. That implies a public clamor for such services, and patients may indeed talk about and ask for CAM more than they used to (although that isn’t clear). But surveys showing widespread use—like one issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2004 reporting that 62 percent of adult Americans had used some form of CAM in the previous year—are highly misleading. The big numbers reflect activities such as prayer, which few would consider CAM, and meditation, now routinely prescribed to help lower high blood pressure. The Atkins and Zone diets (“diet-based therapies”) were counted in the CDC survey, too. A more selective reading indicates that about 5 percent used yoga, 1.1 percent acupuncture, and 0.5 percent energy therapy, to pick three more-representative offerings.
The purpose of Mikey’s trial is to put his touch therapy to the kind of test demanded by CAM critics: Prove that it can produce medical results beyond simply reducing stress or anxiety. Children having a bone marrow transplant are being divided into two groups. One will receive the therapy before and in the weeks after the marrow transplant. The other group will be visited on the same schedule by staff or volunteers who talk, read, or color with them. (The investigators won’t know which children are in which group.) The working presumption, says Steinhorn, is that the energy-therapy group will take up the transplanted bone marrow stem cells more readily and with fewer complications, allowing those children to leave the hospital sooner. Early findings should be available by the end of this year.
To read the rest of the story use the above link.
What are the Benefits of Healing Touch?
Healing Touch Benefits that have been documented in at least one research study:
- Pain relief or decrease in pain level
- Acceleration of Post-operative recovery
- Symptom relief during or after chemotherapy
- Development or deepening of a spiritual connection
- Decreased agitation in those with dementia [calming of those with dementia]
- Decrease depression
- Decrease anxiety
- Improved quality of life
- Assistance with the dying process (relaxation, peace, acceptance)
- Improved mood
- Decreased stress
- Improved mobility after surgery
- Decreased use of pain medications post-operatively
- Decreasd negative effects of trauma/chronic pain/ and post traumatic stress
- Improved symptoms in auto-immune disorders
- Support for withdrawal from substance abuse
- Immune system strengthening and support
What is Healing Touch?
· Healing Touch is a complimentary energy therapy that can be used in conjunction with traditional therapies or as a stand-alone treatment.
· Healing Touch is an energy based therapy that is used internationally and found in numerous hospitals and medical offices throughout the United States.
· Healing Touch has been actively researched since its inception and has been granted funding from many medical centers, universities and other supporters of Integrative Medicine including National Institute of Health (Office of Complimentary-Alternative Medicine).
· Healing Touch is for people & pets
Healing Touch: A Cost Effectiveness Study
Mary Beth Lodge, RN, BSN, CHTP
“A cost effectiveness study was conducted to assess the overall impact of the
inclusion of energy medicine (Healing Touch) and imagery on utilization of benefits and medical costs. It was a thirteen-month study with 440 employees in a self-insured manufacturing company. Healing Touch was included as a benefit available to any employee or dependent covered under the medical benefits plan. There were a total of 38 participants with chronic disease. Overall medical costs were higher during the study year than the previous year. The cost of the study represented on 3% of total medical benefit costs to the company. A co-pay comparable to other outpatient benefits of the medical plan would have reduced this. The company decided to include Healing Touch in its benefit plan with a co-pay after receiving demands for continuation of this service from study participants.”
Healing Touch sessions begin with the client filling out an intake form similar to one you fill out at a Dr.’s office. The form is intended to let the practitioner know what the client is feeling physically and/or emotionally, also if there is any medical conditions the practitioner should be aware of to better aide the client in getting the most out of their session. Client and practitioner will discuss what is going on with client and what the goal of the session is; client will then lie on the massage table fully clothed. Healing Touch utilizes light or near body touch to clear balance and energize the energy system in an effort to promote healing for the mind, body and spirit. After the Healing Touch treatment you are asked about your session, how you are feeling, and to answer any questions you may have. Everything is held in confidentiality between practitioner and client.
At the end of a session clients generally have an over all greater sense of well being.
Healing Touch does not replace medical care.
Contact Information:
Phone: 586.719.4582
Email: CaroleHealingTouch@Hotmail.com
Handicapped Pets