Healing Touch: Essential Energy Medicine for Yourself and Others

"Practitioners can receive energy through their heartfelt intentions and send it to a recipient with their hands." So writes Cyndi Dale, author of THE SUBTLE BODY: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YOUR ENERGETIC ANATOMY (2009). The sentence quoted above appears in Ms Dale's Foreword to her friend Dorothea Hover-Kramer's HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS (2011). *** Elsewhere (Ch. 17) Linnie Thomas writes,: "Of the over 200 therapies that I have investigated within energy medicine, Healing Touch is the best entry-level program in energy medicine available, and the most professional." Linnie Thomas is the author of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENERGY MEDICINE (2010, 568 pp.) ***Who will, who should read HEALING TOUCH? Allegedly, there are at least two to six million clients or patients who have applied, taught, taken or benefitted from energy medicine. Readers of HEALING TOUCH will certainly include thousands of American nurses, the core users of the hand healing techniques described by Dorothea Hover-Kramer. In addition, users or beneficiaries of Reiki, a different, Buddhism-derived hand healing system, will be curious about how Hover-Kramer's Healing Touch Program (1989) differs from the Reiki revealed in Japan during a Buddhist retreat to Mikao Usui (1914). Novices simply curious about new buzz words involving magnetic medicine, chakras, meridians, Chinese medicine, energy healing, Ayurvedic medicine, auras, bodyfields and other terms will want to add HEALING TOUCH to his or her short list of "must" readings. *** With so many energy therapies, related associations and web sites now available, each major technique is, perhaps inevitably at this early stage, very teacher specific or author specific. Dr (Phd in Educational Psychology) Hover-Kramer therefore lays out her earned credentials as well as her 30-year healing career, including nothing but successes in relieving headaches or accelerating the healing of wounds, etc. through Healing Touch, a very concrete program (HTP) widely taught since 1990. *** Dr Hover-Kramer lays out a brief history of the Healing Touch Program (HTP) and its predecessors such as Therapeutic Touch. The author concedes that evidence to date for the effectiveness of Healing Touch as an alternative to traditional Western diagnosis and chemical and surgical healing is still overwhelmingly anecdotal and episodic. But there are now, as well, nearly 100 scientific studies of the emerging field of energy medicine. And more are on the way. In addition NIH (National Institutes of Health) has been studying alternative (non-allopathic) medicines since the 1980s. The NIH's NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Aternative Medicine) has listed seven areas of "adjuncts to conventional medical care." Reiki and Healing Touch fit among area Seven: "Interventions that bring about integration of body and mind such as yoga, prayer, mental and emotional healing, and energy medicine modalities." Not-unrelated bio-electromagnetic applications make up area One. And be it noted that Healing Touch assumes that human bodies are vibrating magnetic fields and that removing obstacles in flows within those fields heals. *** With many black and white drawings of how and where to place hands in order to heal, HEALING TOUCH is an impressive, simple, easily understandable, not very deminding but rewarding read. Demystification of energy healing and hand healing is what this book is all about. To be effective, a practitioner must above all care for, will the good of, love the person being treated. The rest is a matter of training. This is non-interventive medicine at its promising best. But way out there Healing Touch is -- at the cutting edge of main-stream medicine's rawest, newest frontier. -OOO-