Touch Healing Methods: Therapeutic Touch by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz

One branch of CAM is biofield therapies. Most biofield therapies share the same philosophy, but differ in respect of the hand positions adopted during the delivery process (Anderson & Taylor, 2012). In TT, the practitioner’s hands do not make actual physical contact with the patient.
Therapeutic touch was developed by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz in the 1970s as a non-invasive nursing intervention (Kelly et al. 2004). Jackson and Keegan (2009, p.614) defined therapeutic touch as “a specific technique of centring intention used while the practitioner moves the hands through a recipient’s energy field for the purpose of assessing and treating energy field imbalance.” The original theory of the technique proposed by nursing theorist Rogers (1970) is that individuals as a unified whole have their own permeable energy fields that extend from the skin surface and flow evenly when they are healthy. The energy field of the ill physical body is disrupted, misaligned, obstructed or “out of tune” (Huff et al. 2006). TT has the potential to re-pattern, reorganize and restore the individual’s imbalanced energy fields through the open system extending from the surface of the body interacting with the environment constantly (Krieger, 1979). The earliest studies of healing touch were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s: biochemist Bernard Grad (1965) collaborated with famous healer Oskar Estebany to demonstrate the significantly accelerated healing effects of therapeutic touch on wounded mice and damaged barley seeds. The central aim of healing therapies is to relax and calm patients in order to activate patients’ natural healing ability, and it does not include any religious activity (Lorenc et al. 2010).
3. Literature review
The efficacy of ta...

... middle of paper ...

...ofessional variations.
Environmental influences:
Nurses’ ability to provide interpersonal and comforting touch could be impaired by the current fast-paced, high-acuity and understaffed hospital-centred setting (Connor & Howett, 2009). Nursing is one of the few roles in contemporary society in which physical contact, even with intimate parts of the body, is accepted (Green, 2013). The frequent touch nurses encounter in patient care, however, is not always deliberate and with the intention of enhancing care (Connor & Howett, 2009). A stressful environment hinders nurses from achieving a state of therapists’ inner balance to perform tactile touch in hospitals (Henricson et al. 2006). In the absence of a quiet, independent environment, the positive outcomes of tactile touch are unlikely to be achieved and may even contribute to nurses’ fatigue (Homayouni et al. 2012).