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Healing hands - noncontact therapeutic touch

Psychology Today , July-August, 1989 by Melvin Schecter

Healing Hands

The book on the patient`s bedside table is titled Giant Book of Laughter, but the elderly, fragile-looking woman doesn`t laugh much. She has had an artificial hip joint surgically implanted, and her doctors suspect post-surgical infection. She is in constant pain. Drugs help some, but not enough. She has been to a pain clinic where they taught her to meditate, but that didn`t help at all. Now she`s trying a mental healer, although her skepticism is clear as the healer enters her room.

Undaunted by the skepticism, the healer instructs the woman to close her eyes and relax. Then the healer glides her hands, palms down, a few inches above the patient`s body. Her hands make long, sweeping movements; she seems to probe the air, feeling for something. Then she finds it, and her hands stop above the patient`s right hip. The healer closes her eyes in concentration as her hands stroke the air.

The session takes a scant 10 minutes, but at the end the patient is sleeping peacefully. When an observer gently squeezes her hand, she wakes. Her smile is radiant.

This scene took place not at some New Age faith healer`s inner sanctum but in a private room at modern, sophisticated New York University (NYU) Medical Center. The healer is Barbara Delmore, a registered nurse. Similar scenes take place in hospitals across the country as an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 nurses practice the form of mental healing called noncontact therapeutic touch, or NCTT.

Derived from the ancient art of laying on of hands, NCTT is based on the controversial notion that we all emit energy, which can be felt radiating from our bodies. This energy field, the theory goes, is uniformly smooth in a healthy person but irregular in someone with disease or pain. NCTT practitioners believe that by focusing their minds on healthy thoughts--the intent to heal is crucial--they can detect the disturbances in another person`s energy field and return it to a balanced state.

This may sound unbalanced, but practitioners claim that you can experience the energy for yourself. Hold your hands in front of you with the palms facing, as close as possible without touching. Most people are surprised to feel a barely perceptible pulsing sensation. To some it seems like heat; others report a tingly sensation or a feeling like a mild electric shock. And skeptics insist that whatever it feels like, it`s pure hokum and has nothing to do with healing.

Researchers, however, are beginning to investigate how NCTT affects patients. Janet F. Quinn, a registered nurse and scholar-in-residence at the Center for Human Caring at the University of Colorado School of Nursing, has produced solid experimental evidence that may change the way we look at the technique.

After she measured the anxiety levels of 60 hospitalized cardiac patients, nurses treated half of them with NCTT. The rest received treatment that looked similar but had one key difference: Instead of mentally focusing on healing, nurses did arithmetic problems in their minds.

Quinn found a significant reduction in anxiety in patients who received bona fide NCTT, even though they didn`t know they were being treated. The patients treated by mock healers were not helped.

If NCTT reduces anxiety, it should also reduce the pain caused by anxiety, reasoned Virginia Bzdek, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Nursing. To test her theory, she and her student Elizabeth Keller had 30 people who suffered tension headaches treated with genuine NCTT and 30 others treated with mock NCTT. The results were much like Quinn`s. Patients who received the real thing reported a much greater reduction in headache pain than did the others.

"Most of our doctors don`t even know about the technique," says Margaret L. McClure, executive director of nursing at NYU Medical Center. "When we tell them about it," adds Delmore, "some seem interested, but a lot of them just don`t take it seriously. They tolerate it because it can`t do any harm. They`re satisfied that we never use it as a replacement for traditional nursing and medical practices."

Manhattan dentist Jan Linhart decided against offering NCTT to selected patients, unable to believe that a psychic transfer of some life energy really produces healing. Even Quinn admits that she`s found no convincing experimental evidence that this energy, whatever it is, exists. But she also concedes that it`s not necessary to postulate an exotic energy exchange to explain the success of NCTT. What happens in NCTT could be as simple as a practitioner`s transmitting a sense of calm to an anxious patient.

For NCTT to be effective, the healer must assume a relaxed, meditative state. Brain-wave patterns confirm this meditative state in both healer and patient. "It may be that calmness is contagious, but this is not inconsistent with the notion of a transfer of energy," Quinn says. "The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive."

The transfer-of-energy hypothesis, unproven as it is, would help to explain some other claims made for NCTT -- claims that go well beyond relieving tension and pain caused by tension. It has been reported, for example, that NCTT can reduce swelling and fever, heal wounds faster and help bone fractures mend in less time. It`s hard to reconcile such claims with the notion that NCTT works only because a relaxed nurse means a relaxed patient.

Second opinion

Spectator, The , Apr 19, 2003 by Dalrymple, Theodore

It used to be that one listened for the first cuckoo of spring; nowadays, one listens for the first smashed car window of spring. Car-breaking is as seasonal as grouseshooting or fly-fishing, the acquisitive instinct of feral British youth being somewhat abated by inclement weather. But now the greenish shards of glass that beautify many a British kerbside sparkle prettily in the spring sunshine: it is obviously what God made the sun for, at least round here. I certainly cannot think of any other reason why He didn`t leave us in our native darkness.

But spring is also traditionally the season of love. I realised this last week as soon as I walked on to the ward. A woman was lying in the first bed with her right arm resting on the top blanket. On her hand were tattooed, sans serif, those affecting words, True Love.

It wasn`t difficult to divine why she was here. Her love was like a red, red nose that sweetly bleeds in June.

`Boyfriend?` I asked.

`Ex,` she said.

`You`ve left him?`

`Yes. I went to my other ex what lives upstairs and what I had me babby off.`

In the next bed was a woman with a tattoo of two koala bears kissing one another. She had tried to hang herself, from which I concluded that she had what are delicately referred to round here as relationship problems. I was not much mistaken.

`My fiance called me a smackhead, so I went ballistic and started hitting.`

`Why did he call you a smackhead?`

`I was only smoking the draw to make me relax.`

`Is he violent himself?`

`He`s very violent, yes, once he gets going.`

`Has he hit you?`

`Not in the meaning way, just to get me out of his way.`

`Does he ever strangle you?`

`Yes,` she said, amazed at my perceptiveness. `How did you know?`

I`ve heard it all before, of course - and will again, many times. I moved on to a male patient. He looked at me with the narrowed eyes of porcine aggression. He looked to me as if he had hit as in hit, and so it turned out.

`I`ve punched a lot of people I shouldn`t`ve punched,` he said.

`You mean, there are many you should have punched?`

`But I`ve got to get my anger out, doctor.`

`What are you angry about?`

`Stress.`

`What stress?`

`I`m in court next week for hitting my girlfriend.`

`And you hit other people as well?`

`Yes, my mum`s going into nutter`s mode. It`s killing her, it`s killed my dad and my missis.`

What a relief to turn from him to an Indian patient. Indians - a people with a proud, living tradition - don`t have true love; they have arranged marriages, which last longer. However, this particular Indian had tried to hang himself because of the marriage his parents wanted to arrange.

`Don`t you get on well with your parents?` I asked.

`I spend more time with them now they`ve got Sky TV.`

Alas, this was the root of the problem.

`They watched Asian TV too much and it gave them ideas for a wedding.`

`And you don`t want one?`

`Don`t get me wrong, doctor,` he said.

`Destiny`s going to play its role somewhere.`

`If it doesn`t,` I said, `it`s not destiny.`

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