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.

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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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

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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.

How effective is Healing Touch?
Because of the effective results seen over recent years, Healing Touch is now part of patient care systems in more than 25 hospitals in the United States. Healing Touch skills are becoming increasingly validated in health care systems around the country. Hospitals that support the practice of Healing Touch as part of their integrative health care system have found that it facilitates the return of compassion to the forefront of patient care.

Hospitals, nursing and medical schools, and allied health professions throughout the world are increasingly embracing Integrative Medicine as consumer demand multiplies and as research supports its use. Healing Touch has had an active research program for over 10 years and more than 50 Healing Touch studies have been completed at universities, medical centers and in other settings. See research studies at www.healingtouchinternational.com

Healing Touch History
The Healing Touch Program has been taught since 1989 to more than 86,000 participants worldwide. The program (originally known as Colorado Center for Healing Touch) was developed by Janet Mentgen, BSN, RN, HNC, CHTP/I, as a medically-based energy therapy training program for nurses. Over the last 17 years Healing Touch has been effective in demonstrating a positive impact in the health care community. Healing Touch is widely respected and increasingly accepted, not only in the United States, but in many countries around the globe. It is considered one of the leading energy medicine programs in the world.

From the Healing Touch International site

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

Mumbai News

New York: An unconventional therapy called the healing touch is gaining acceptance as complementary aid in some US hospitals.

Although research on the technique – which uses light touch and deep breathing – is limited, it is practiced at 30 US hospitals and by nearly 2,000 certified therapists, according to Healing Touch International (HTI).

The system incorporates ancient Asian healing techniques and was developed in the 1980s by a nurse, Janet Mentgen.

Nurse Jackie Levin (left) using the healing-touch therapy on fellow nurse Sarla Santos at New York University Medical Centre

A healing touch therapist will gently touch or glide his hands through the patient’s energy points or affected areas, such as shoulders, feet and forehead. The practitioner concentrates on each point for a few minutes.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) classifies it as “energy medicine,” in which practitioners believe illness results from disturbances of subtle energy fields, and calls it controversial.

The NIH says neither the external energy fields nor the therapeutic effects have been demonstrated convincingly.

However, some hospitals, including the New York University Medical Centre, have approved it as a complement to traditional rehabilitation.

Lisa Anselme, executive director at the HTI, stresses the method was not meant to stand alone.

“Healing touch is not intended to replace standard treatment. It’s a complementary therapy,” said Anselme, a registered nurse and healing touch practitioner.

Users of the controversial therapy agree.

“I would still see my doctor, but I wanted to make sure there were no blockages between my mind and body,” said Nancy Hauserman, a college professor who used the therapy. “In fact, my own doctor was extremely impressed with how fast my wound has healed.”