Therapeutic touch offers relief from pain
Affects heart rate, blood pressure
Administrators at Via Christi Regional Medical Center in Wichita, KS, made a commitment to alternative therapies when they established a complementary healing services department more than two years ago. Coordinator Barbara Denison, RN, BSN, a therapeutic touch practitioner and teacher, lobbied for eight years to develop a department and got permission when a new medical-surgical director came on board and became her "administrative champion."
"It takes a grass-roots effort as well as administrative support to be able to accomplish this," says Denison. "These are springing up all over the country. Health care facilities that are on the leading edge of health promotion and body/ mind ideas are starting departments like this."
In addition to offering therapeutic touch at the bedside in surgical and medical intensive care units and elsewhere in the hospital, she offers patients music therapy; relaxation tapes; guided imagery; and neck, shoulder, and back massage. Those services are most effective for managing pain, relieving anxiety, and promoting wound healing, she says.
"Pain medication sometimes doesn't do the trick, so adding this to the plan of care can often be beneficial," Denison says.
When doing therapeutic touch in ICUs, Denison says practitioners can gauge its effectiveness by observing patients' "relaxation response" on monitors.
"It's a pretty consistent finding that heart rate and blood pressure decrease and respiration slows," she says.
Denison offers therapeutic touch classes every other month to interested staff to increase the number of nurses who are available to provide the service, and classes are always full, she adds.
Therapeutic touch is "a wonderful thing to be able to offer patients in the ICU who are very sick and in pain," says Nonie Muller-Smith, MSN, RN, TTP, regional practitioner/educator for the four hospitals and other allied facilities of Mercy Health Partners in Cincinnati.
A therapeutic touch practitioner for 19 years as well as a qualified teacher, Muller-Smith agrees that the therapy promotes a relaxation response and also facilitates communication with patients who are heavily medicated or otherwise unable to speak due to a tracheal tube or ventilator.
"A predominant issue for ICU patients is pain management. If a patient is in pain, it's possible to pick up pain symptoms from doing therapeutic touch and to assess whether the patient needs more pain medication," she explains. "It can help with the nursing assessment about pain and, at the same time, is a very good pain management intervention. We don't try to make claims beyond what we see, but at the very least we can say that it improves the patient's quality of life and sense of well-being, and often we are able to reduce the pain medication as well."
Muller-Smith describes the basis of therapeutic touch as "the compassionate reaching out to another person to catalyze the healing process." Practitioners of healing touch, another touch therapy, describe their service similarly. (See related story, below.)
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