Holistic Medicine
Nurse brings healing touch back into nursing
By Joan Tupponce

“She got relief from something narcotics weren’t touching.” - Deny Clark , RN

Even though RN and nurse practitioner Deny Clark embraced the idea of holistic nursing, she didn’t realize its power until she was compelled to use holistic methods on a woman after the delivery of her child in 1995. The new mother was suffering from a severe headache brought on by a spinal anesthesia procedure before delivery. “She was in agony,” Clark recalls. “Nothing was relieving her pain.”

Clark mentioned to the woman that she knew a relaxation technique called “healing touch” that might help reduce the pain. The woman urged her to do whatever she could. “She went from rising agony to drifting off into a relaxed sleep,” Clark recalls. “It was the first time I had seen healing touch work. She slept peacefully for six hours.”

The episode came a few months after Clark had completed classes on healing touch. Up to this point, she was leery of telling her peers at work about her holistic studies. But, when the woman Clark had helped was in pain the next day, her husband sought out Clark once again.

“I was out of the closet,” Clark says. “I went back to help her and she got relief again. She got relief from something narcotics weren’t touching.”

The idea of holistic healing isn’t new to the nursing community. The American Holistic Nurses Association has been around since 1981 supporting “the concepts of holism – a state of harmony among body, mind, emotions and spirit within an ever-changing environment.”

“When I went to nursing school in the 1960s it wasn’t called holistic healing but we were still looking at a person holistically,” Clark says.

Debbie Troxell is a registered nurse with an MS in Natural Health and is a parish nurse and director of Wellness for Life, a division of American Critical Care Services. She became aware of holistic health and wellness when she was in nursing school. “Nurses are trained to assess patients in mind, body and spirit aspects,” she says, adding that natural health has been an integral part of patient care in the western United States for years. “Herbs, acupuncture and acupressure have been a staple for thousands of years. Native Americans have used herbal remedies for centuries.”

Troxell’s awareness of holistic wellness broadened in the mid-1990s when she worked at Retreat Hospital in Richmond. “One of the doctors I worked with had studied with Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard who pioneered much of the work in the mind/body realm,” says Troxell, now an RN/natural health practitioner. “She formed the Mind/Body Network of which I was a member. I had the opportunity to network with various practitioners of alternative and complementary methods.”

Holistic nursing is now a specialty that is practiced nationwide. This type of nursing is based on a body of knowledge, evidence-based research, sophisticated skill sets, defined standards of practice and a philosophy of living and being that is grounded in caring, relationship, and interconnectedness. It looks at health beyond the disease.

“If we have someone who has symptoms but the diagnosis can’t be found, we don’t know what to do with them in a traditional healthcare model,” explains RN and nurse practitioner, Jo Robins, Ph.D., who is a post doctoral fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University in the School of Nursing Center for Biobehavioral Clinical Research. “We are trained in a sickness-based model that is disease focused.”

Robins has been involved in holistic nursing since 1993 when she worked as a nurse practitioner in a women’s health practice. “I saw a lot of women who weren’t well but didn’t have anything that could be diagnosed,” she explains.

Robins, now also a healing touch practitioner and wellness consultant at South River Compounding Pharmacy, started using relaxation, breathing and aromatherapy with her clients before moving into more extensive mind/body medicine and guided imagery. “These were things that people could do to feel better,” she says. “That has grown into my current research focus, psychoneuro- immunology, the affects of stress on the immune system.”

Holistic nursing, Robins says, has a framework for incorporating complementary and alternative medicine into traditional nursing. “We are taught first and foremost to diagnose and treat people’s responses to their health and life challenges,” she says. “We’re taught this in nursing school.”

Troxell is including holistic nursing into her work at Wellness for Life. “We provide education on healthy lifestyle choices,” she explains. “We recognize as nurses that we do like to look at the person as an integrated whole.”

The center offers clients everything from detoxification to Ion cleansing footbaths; from massage therapy to stress management; from pastoral counseling to bio-identical hormone replacement therapy assessments. “Healthy lifestyles do work to help people look and feel better,” Troxell says. “Using the natural approach takes individuality into account because we are each unique in our needs.”

Clark finds that energy healing helps people in a variety of ways because it creates a deep relaxation response that releases a cascade of chemicals, improving blood flow and increasing oxygenation. “It gives people a sense of peace and centeredness,” she says. “It makes a difference in pain management and it helps recovery time. It helps support healing.”

Medical studies have shown that using a stimulus with electrical current can help fractures that are difficult to heal. “I do the same thing but I’m not plugged into Dominion Power,” Clark says. “I serve as a conduit to transmit energy.” Energy healing is a not a magic bullet, she adds.

“I never make specific claims. I look at it has complementary and integrative approach. I am always stressing to people that this is not to take the place of medical care.”

Troxell believes that a natural approach to wellness can and does enhance a person’s well being. “Individuals can benefit from taking responsibility for their own health,” she says. “These principles give people hope and encouragement that they can incorporate tangible, practical methods to look and feel better so they can be at their best and live life fully.”

People today are looking for alternative therapies, searching for answers that have eluded them in the past. “There is a wellness revolution going on in this country now,” Troxell says. “A lot of people want to take charge of their health. I’m hoping for the day that insurance companies will offer a benefit for people who are trying to stay healthy.”

Even though nurses take care of others, they often fail to look after their own health. “One of the core concepts of holistic nursing is self-care,” Robins says. “What can you do to take care of yourself so that you can take care of others? In order to go through the holistic nursing curriculum you have to have that self-care piece.”

Holistic nursing teaches you that you are a therapeutic presence in and of yourself, Robins adds. “You are able to step into a relationship with someone. You can help them by your willingness to be present with them in a situation. Holistic nursing reminds us of what nursing is about.”

The comfort that a holistic nurse in a facility setting provides can be extended through the touch of a hand, a back rub or deep breathing techniques during a stressful procedure, for example. “Sometimes patients would like to pray before surgery,” Troxell says. “If a nurse is comfortable doing that, it’s something that could be done. Nurses can incorporate additional aspects of care to also help meet the patient’s emotional and spiritual needs.”