Sharp Coronado Hospital offers a specialized Healing Touch course, a component of Integrative Care Services, five times each year to staff and volunteers, and is opening the course up to several community members per class. Healing Touch Therapy uses gentle, noninvasive touch to access the body’s natural energy system to recover from physical and mental stress. This therapy is offered to patients and staff alongside conventional treatments, and studies suggest it helps reduce anxiety, lowers stress, promotes wound healing, and eases pain.
Cathy McJannet RN, MN, CEN, HTCP/I, a nurse with more than 40 years of experience in both the clinical and academic settings, is Coronado’s Volunteer Lead for Integrative Care and certified Healing Touch instructor. In the late 1990s, while on the faculty of Southwestern College, she was asked to learn and then teach Integrative Care to nursing students. As a self-described skeptic of intangible healing techniques, McJannet was surprised to observe the positive outcomes of this therapy. She approached Coronado’s then CEO Susan Stone with the idea of using Healing Touch on the hospital’s staff to gain experience necessary for certification. The overwhelmingly beneficial feedback from staff launched the program in Coronado. Since that time, Healing Touch has become more commonplace in hospital settings and is utilized throughout the Sharp HealthCare system.
In McJannet’s experience, healing touch regularly decreases pain by 50% within 30 minutes of treatment. She has even trained her husband to help her with her sinus headaches. “He calls it ‘voodoo’! But it definitely works on me! I am headache-free within ten minutes.” In the Emergency Department setting, it helps patients get their veins to become more accessible for blood draws, decrease pain, and lower blood pressure. McJannet says it is “fabulous” in the medical-surgical department. It works on many joint replacement patients to decrease pain, in the operating room to calm patients before surgery, and post-surgery to help clear the body of the fog of anesthesia…