Unit 5 Flashcards
What is magnets therapy?
a safe, noninvasive method of applying magnetic fields to the body for therapeutic purposes.
What is most popular with magnetic therapy?
The use of magnets for pain management
What are Reiki, Therapeutic touch, qigong and healing touch?
energy therapies
How does Reiki, Therapeutic touch, qigong and healing touch work?
thought to help repattern the patients energy field and accelerate healing of the body, mind and spirit
What is Reiki, Therapeutic touch, qigong and healing touch based on?
that human beings are fields of energy from others and the environment
Describe what a typical Therapeutic touch is like
practitioner begins with a entering process to calm the mind, access compassion, and become present with the patient
then focuses attention on the patients highest good
places their hand on the patients body or slightly away
makes sweeping motion above the body
Does Therapeutic touch work on wound healing?
inconclusive
What is Therapeutic touch designed to treat?
not designed to treat any specific disease but to balance the energy field of the patient or improve their energy through boosting
What are the most common touch therapies used in nursing practice?
Therapeutic touch, healing touch, and reiki
What is reiki performed for?
to help patients strengthen their wellness, assist them in coping with symptoms such as pain or fatigue, chronic pain or end of life care
Is magnetic therapy beneficial for pain?
Overall the studies point to magnet therapy being an effective method of relieving pain.
Analgesic effects are greater than placebo in magnetic therapy
Of 19 quality studies, 12 found positive results and six found negative results
These studies present a causal link between magnetic therapy and pain relief
Why must you be careful when examining pain relief in any study?
because the analgesic effects often reported are often due to a placebo and not actual pain relief
What is the speculated mechanism of action for magnetic therapy?
generally accepted theory is static magnetic fields from 1 to 10 G affect ion-ligand binding producing modulation
May also be realignment of anisotropic molecules in the body by magnetic field
What is therapeutic touch based on?
The belief that a universal life energy sustains all living organisms and that this energy field has order and balance.
How is energy flow in healthy and diseased states?
In health the energy flows freely in, through and out of the body in a balanced manner.
In disease the energy flow may be obstructed, disordered or depleted. The is corrected by rebalancing the energy
what are the benefits of receiving therapeutic touch?
based on the experiences of people; reduced anxiety and stress, relaxation, increase in well-being, pain reduction, healing promotion
What type of nursing intervention is therapeutic touch believed to be?
an independent nursing intervention that does not require a doctors directive
How can Ockham’s razor explain energy medicine?
we should start with the principle that the factors most likely to be responsible for observations are the well-established explanations that occur with many types of CAM therapies, the placebo effect, the laws of chance, and that observations were inaccurately recorded.
Only when we disprove these theories can we turn to quantum physics as an explanation.
Do HT, TT, or reiki achieve any of the benefits claimed by their practitioners?
The authors of the paper concluded that TT and reiki can reduce pain, but that HT does not achieve this.
The degree of pain reduction was less than one unit on a ten-point scale.
The apparent success of TT and reiki is based on several studies that reported better results with active treatment than was seen with sham treatment or no treatment.
A greater effect was seen with more experienced practitioners. This leaves open the possibility that experienced practitioners are especially effective at making patients feel that their pain should be lessened, and that the patients then experience what they believe should happen. Pain is, of course, a highly subjective sensation.
Describe an experiment which can test if Therapeutic touch is effective for treatment.
she invited 21 experienced practitioners to put both of their hands through holes in a cardboard screen.
She flipped coins to determine whether to hold her hand near, but not touching, their left or right hands.
If they were able to “feel” the presence of the body or to “sense” her biofield, then they would be able to tell her where her hand was.
However, in repeated trials, none of them were able to correctly identify the location of her hand at a rate better than the 50-50 chance that random guessing would give them.
What “flaws” exist in the study that was done by the nine year old girl to determine if therapeutic touch was real or fake
TT practitioners in this study were expected to “perform” instead of using the five-step process
that TT practitioners use both hands, not one, and move their hands rather than holding them stationary
it is the intention to heal, not whether practitioners can perceive human energy fields, that is important.
What may possibly explain the success of therapeutic touch and reiki?
More care and attention is given to the patient then what is found in conventional medical practice
What is the problem with the studies conducted on Reiki to come to a definitive conclusion?
serious methodological and reporting conditions in the studies conducted on Reiki make it difficult to draw any conclusions from the trials.
Which therapies may be plausible with the given information? Which ones are implausible with the given information to date for energy medicine
Plausible: magnetic therapy
Implausible: reiki, therapeutic touch, healing touch
Why is magnetic therapy plausible when examining the CNS? Hint, involves ions
Nervous system functions on changes in charged particles. It may be possible that magnet therapy changes these charged ions
What is the most plausible explanation of therapeutic touch and reiki?
the placebo effect is more likely as well as spending more time with the patient can be therapeutic
Describe how a practitioner of reiki carries out treatment.
Is extremely passive
Practitioners lay their hands on or just over them without moving except from one part to another
They do not attempt to adjust the energy field
No assessment of the patients energy field is performed
no attempt to reorganize the energy field is performed
They believe that healing arises from the hands as the patient needs it
Give two reasons why TT is considered by conventional medicine to be an unproven therapy.
The founder and proponents of TT state that it involves the use of the hands in a sensitive search of the healer’s energy field for indications of energy imbalance. However, there is no scientific evidence to suggest the presence of a human energy field or whether it can be detected by a TT practitioner. There is no scientific explanation for the mode of action of TT.
Based on Ockham’s razor suggest a likely explanation for benefits reported by practitioners of reiki.
Ockham’s razor implies that benefits seen with the use of reiki most probably come from such factors as the practitioners being very effective at inducing the placebo effect and/or that they spend time with patients and give them attention. These aspects of the intervention may have therapeutic value.
Reflexology is a therapy that?
is a combination of massage principles, incorporation of longitudinal pathways, and connections to body parts.
The analgesic benefits of magnetic therapy are most likely due to the placebo effect. Do you agree with this statement?
This statement appears to be false. Numerous well-designed studies support the value of magnetic therapy for reducing pain. The effect therefore seems to be much greater than can be explained by the placebo effect or other errors in the way the studies were carried out.
