Therapeutic Touch
The practice of therapeutic touch began in the 1970’s, and was developed by Dora Kunz and Delores Krieger. Krieger was an instructor at a New York school of nursing, and Therapeutic Touch is often taught as part of a nursing curriculum. There are over 40,000 Therapeutic Touch practitioners in the US, most of them nurses.
Like Reiki and Chinese medicine, Therapeutic Touch is based on the premise that manipulating a person’s energy field can bring about healing. Therapeutic Touch focuses more on the aura, or the energy surrounding a person, than on the chakras, or energy fields within a person.
A Therapeutic Touch session takes 20-30 minutes, and involves four processes:
- Centering. Both patient and healer focus quietly and calmly on the patient.
- Assessment. The healer moves his hands over the patient’s aura, rhythmically and symmetrically, searching for areas where the energy field is disrupted. Healers describe feeling areas of warmth, tingling, energy and other sensations.
- Intervention. The energy field is cleared or unruffled by moving the hands smoothly over the body, breaking up areas of congestion and facilitating energy flow. The energy field is rebalanced by transferring energy from one place to another, or by transferring energy from the healer to the patient.
- Evaluation and closure. The session ends and the healer and patient evaluate its success.
The Therapeutic Touch process mirrors the Nursing Process, which nurses use in every aspect of their practice.
Therapeutic Touch is useful in decreasing pain, relaxation and stress relief, wound healing and easing dying. Some people claim its benefits are all psychological, and they may be correct. Whether psychological or physical, Therapeutic Touch does help people who are distressed and in pain, and they heal faster as a result.