Word: tt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reason, suggests Carla Selby, of the Rocky Mountain group, is that it's a form of empowerment for women who generally feel that they are second-class citizens in the medical profession -- unappreciated and directed by (mostly male) doctors to perform largely scut work. Being allowed to practice TT in hospitals, she says, makes them feel more involved in the healing process. "I'm a feminist," Selby says, "and I'm all for nurses getting out from under the thumbs of doctors. But this is exactly the wrong thing...
...what's the harm? ask TT devotees, who seem bewildered by the flap. Kathy Butler, a Melbourne geneticist concerned about TT inroads into Australia, has one answer. "Health funding is in crisis," she says. "Surely valuable nursing hours are better used with scientifically proven, genuinely useful nursing methods...
...federal medical funding is getting tighter, but not for therapeutic touch. Over the past decade, the nih has awarded at least $150,000 in grants for TT research; and the Department of Defense, through Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, has just awarded a University of Alabama researcher the largest TT grant yet: $355,000 to study the effects of the practice on burn patients. "What next for the dod?" asks Scheiber. "Faith healing...
Despite the growing skepticism, TT practitioners show no reticence in discussing their work. "It's not something we do under the table," says Dolores Kreiger, who invented the technique in the 1970s as a professor at the New York University nursing school and claims to have taught it since then to some 45,000 health professionals. "There is validity to therapeutic touch," she insists. "Otherwise we would have been burned as witches long...
...steps for administering TT to a patient seem akin to witchcraft. As described by nurse Quinn, a leading advocate of the technique, they include "centering" within one's head, assessing which areas of the energy field feel "out of balance" with the rest of the field, clearing and mobilizing the energy field, and finally, "directing" energy to facilitate healing. Quinn admits, though, that "we don't have empirical data to demonstrate the existence of a personal energy field. It's a working hypothesis. In science, you're allowed to do that...