What is Healing Touch?
Healing Touch is a relaxing, nurturing energy therapy that helps to restore and balance energy that has been depleted due to stress, illness, injury, grief, medical conditions, surgery, or treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. It is a complementary alternative medicine approach to health and healing. It can be used in conjunction with traditional therapies or as a stand-alone treatment. Healing Touch works on our physical body, our mind, emotions, and spirit treating the whole person.
What are the goals of Healing Touch?​
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The goals of Healing Touch are to restore harmony and balance in the human energy system by creating an optimal environment to enable the body's innate tendency for healing to occur. Healing Touch teaches self-care and self-healing techniques to the individual. Treatments focus not only on the symptoms of illness but also the issues and thought processes in one's life that allows for dis-ease to progress to disease.
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How does our body respond to energy therapy such as Healing Touch?
Healing Touch promotes relaxation. When your body relaxes, endorphins are released from the brain, which helps muscles to relax. When the muscles relax, circulation is improved and the increased blood flow elevates oxygen levels throughout the body. This, in turn, allows nutrients to be absorbed more efficiently, enzymes are built to aid digestion, hormones are regulated, and toxins are released from the body. This allows healthy cells to regenerate and promotes a sense of well-being which then supports healing and regulates the immune system.
What are the benefits of Healing Touch?
Benefits that have been documented in hundreds of research studies include: pain relief or decreased pain level, acceleration of post-operative healing/recovery, symptom relief during and after chemotherapy, decreased depression, decreased anxiety, improved mood, diminished symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, decreased stress, improved mobility after surgery, decreased use of pain medications post-operative, improved symptoms in auto-immune disorders, immune system strengthening and support, decreased headaches and migraines, reduce the length of hospital stays, and a deepened spiritual connection.​
How does Healing Touch Work?​
Practitioners use their hands with light or near-the-body touch to help clear, balance and energize the human energy system, thus promoting healing for the mind, body, and spirit.
Do I have to believe in this for it to work on me?
No, you can keep your skepticism and it will still work! Your body’s intuitive wisdom will process and benefit from what it knows is for your highest good, whether or not your conscious mind thinks it’s “a little out there”.
What about traditional approaches to health care?​
Healing Touch complements traditional approaches to health and healing. Healing Touch is not a substitute. Referral to physicians and other licensed health care professionals is an expected part of the practice of Healing Touch.
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How effective is Healing Touch?​
Healing Touch is now part of patient care systems in more than 100 hospitals in the United States due in part to the effective results being reported by patients, families, and staff. 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. There have been over 100 research studies showing the effectiveness of Healing Touch in helping patients to heal.
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Is Healing Touch like getting a massage?
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The only way Healing Touch is like massage is that you lie on a massage table for the treatment.
With massage, muscles are manipulated and pressure is applied. When doing Healing Touch the practitioner uses very light, gentle touch and/or makes sweeping movements with her hands near the body. Healing Touch is working with the body's energy system and energy field.
Healing Touch History​
Healing Touch has been taught since 1989 to more than 86,000 participants worldwide. The program (originally known as the 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. Healing Touch is recognized by the American Holistic Nurses Association as a leading energy medicine program.