Scripps hospitals across its system employ nurses trained in Healing Touch and other integrative therapies to assist patients with pain, anxiety, nausea and other health concerns. Furthermore, research indicates they can also aid emotional and spiritual healing.
Every person possesses an energy field and energy centers which affect their mental, physical and emotional well-being. Practitioners use specific hand techniques to clear and balance these fields.
What is Healing Touch?
In the hospital room, an injured man is suffering immensely, and an attendant in medical scrubs stands nearby to offer comfort. Instead of administering IV medicine or checking his vital signs, she uses her hands to make smooth, rhythmic motions across his body.
She is a Healing Touch practitioner and is using this energy-based therapy to help the man feel more relaxed, grounded and centered. This practice is part of an emerging trend toward integrative therapies in hospitals and healthcare settings – these techniques such as Healing Touch, aromatherapy and guided imagery augment conventional treatments in order to promote physical, emotional, mental and spiritual healing.
Healing Touch was pioneered by a registered nurse in the 1980s with the belief that humans are energy fields. A person’s energy field consists of chakras (energy centers) and meridians that cover and connect their physical body, with any blockages to energy flow causing physical, emotional, or spiritual imbalance. Energy specialists consider blockages to energy flow as potentially creating physical, emotional, or spiritual imbalance.
Healing Touch practitioners use noninvasive touch to clear and balance an individual’s energy field, enhance quality of life and help the body heal itself naturally. Healing Touch practitioners have even been used in research studies to see whether its approach could enhance immune systems or mitigate side effects associated with cancer treatments.
Reiki, another energy healing practice, uses the same approach of moving hands over or around the body in a similar fashion to Healing Touch; however, unlike its structured and directive counterpart, Reiki channels universal life force energy for healing without directive input from practitioners.
How is Healing Touch Different from Reiki?
Though they share similar techniques, healing touch and reiki come from distinct spiritual traditions. Both use energy to address imbalances in the human energy system and may be used for physical, emotional or mental wellness. Healing Touch is more clinically-oriented; its combination of modern energy medicine concepts with nursing principles makes it suitable for clinical healthcare settings while Reiki was first created by Mikao Usui in 1912 to channel universal life energy for healing purposes; its spiritual orientation means practitioners sometimes invite communication between sessions with spirit guides during sessions.
Healing Touch is an inclusive practice compatible with diverse belief systems. It recognizes a higher source of energy while encouraging living with compassion, gratitude, and ethics. Furthermore, this holistic practice encourages its practitioners to live by the Reiki Precepts as guidelines in both personal and professional lives.
Healing Touch differs from Reiki in that its practitioner takes an in-person approach to balancing the energy field without using visualization techniques, like lying on a table. Instead, healing touch practitioners concentrate on scanning for imbalances within an individual’s energy field and employing specific techniques to redirect or change this energy flow.
As such, Healing Touch sessions tend to be more focused and meditative than other energy healing practices. Practitioners of Healing Touch are trained to assess clients’ energy fields before and after sessions as well as request feedback from them on their experience and feelings during healing touch sessions.
Healing Touch, once associated with New Age beliefs, is becoming increasingly studied in clinical settings. Some hospitals offer it in cancer clinics to help ease chemotherapy-induced side effects; while other incorporate it into labor and delivery to ease pain, anxiety, and stress for both mother and baby during labor and delivery.
Energy healing modalities offer an innovative and natural approach to supporting the body’s innate healing process on all levels, working holistically for total well-being. At Brahmaloka Healing Arts in Westminster, CO and online, we offer energy healing therapies so everyone can access its many advantages.
How is Healing Touch Used in Healthcare?
Therapeutic Touch and Reiki energy healing techniques are widely utilized within healthcare settings, while individuals can also take up these practices at home as self-healing practices. According to research, Healing Touch may assist in soothing anxiety, decreasing pain, relieving nausea and improving sleep; additional advantages include strengthening immunity after surgery or relieving cancer-related symptoms.
Certified practitioners of Healing Touch can assess and balance a patient’s energy field using gentle hand movements, often with warm or pleasant sensations during sessions. Practitioners also work on energy centers called chakras and meridians within their bodies – this allows the body to release energetic blockages that impede health and healing processes.
Healing Touch was established by registered nurse Janet Mentgen in the 1980s as an energy therapy, with practitioners trained to help their patients feel better through this technique. Combining principles from several ancient healing traditions with scientific understanding of human energy fields, Healing Touch falls under biofield energy therapy along with practices like acupuncture and Qigong.
Practitioners of Healing Touch provide services in tandem and complement to standard medical care, helping their patients tap into their own natural healing capabilities. According to them, people’s life force, or energy source is present across physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions of being.
Healing Touch’s therapeutic techniques are founded on the idea that energy in the body can be balanced to promote healing and wellness. Studies have demonstrated this therapy’s ability to reduce stress, as well as enhance relaxation and increase relaxation levels, all of which contribute towards stimulating its natural ability to heal itself.
Scripps provides Healing Touch and other integrative therapies such as guided imagery and clinical aromatherapy to labor and delivery patients, surgical recovery patients, palliative care patients and throughout its hospital system. Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla currently hosts a pilot program using Healing Touch specifically for obstetrical patients while its research program into aromatherapy continues apace.
