Therapeutic Touch

The world today is seeing a resurgence in alternative medicine and therapeutic approaches to battling stress and disease that were not the mainstream over fifty years ago. Many of these techniques involve the idea of a person having their own energy, and if that energy is clogged and not allowed to flow freely throughout a person, it will experience pain and illness.

Therapeutic touch is a form of "laying on of hands" that involves the exchange of energy from one person to another. This will allow one person to give his or her own energy to a person who is sick or in pain, therefore helping to cure that person.Dolores Krieger developed this technique in the 1970's while she was a professor of Nursing at New York University.

Together with Dora Kuntz, a well-respected "natural" healer and someone who Krieger thought of as a role model, the two developed the healing form known as therapeutic touch. They made it easy to learn, to teach, and to implement so that it would be able to easily work its way into both society and medicine. To this day, Krieger is continuing to research therapeutic touch around the world in order to make a more useful medical technique.

Therapeutic touch is currently taught to over 100,000 practitioners, although only about half of those who are trained in it actually practice the technique. Therapeutic touch involves four steps, beginning with the "centering," a meditative process that is said to align the healer with the patient's energy levels. Next is the 'assessment," where the healer uses his or her hands to detect the energy from a patient and any other forces as well. After the healer has assessed the energy situation of the patient, he or she uses the hands to get rid of excess energy in order to prepare the patient for the final step.

This final step is actually where the healer transfers his or her own excess energy into the patient. There is a form of non-contact therapeutic touch that works the same way, though the hands are held a few inches away from the patient, rather than laid on top.

Therapeutic touch is becoming more and more popular with many therapists and patients alike. With the emergence of more natural ways of dealing with disease, it is a great way to get a holistic and all-natural therapy session in. Although it is a technique that is more debated than some of the other energy-related alternative therapies, it is still held in high regard by many of its practitioners and patients.