Re: NCA grant on learning modules on TT in geriatric care

INTRODUCTION     

Dolores Krieger, PhD, RN

Founder, Nurse Healers – Professional Associates, International

            I am pleased to introduce this innovative research into the teaching of the relationship of the Therapeutic Touch (TT) healing process and its effect on elderly persons in need. This report is being presented in an era that is being signally marked as a unique time for the health of people of advanced age.

            As a healing process, Therapeutic Touch has been involved with persons of advanced age since its introduction as a contemporary healing process by Kunz and Krieger in 1972. /1 During the early years of TT practice the major illnesses of senior persons were concerned with malignancies, cardiovascular and neurological dysfunctions. By the mid’70’s,  as the effectiveness of the TT process became world renowned, several clusters of Grey Panthers, a national group of elderly political activists, undertook to learn TT and practiced it on their older peers who were ill in hospitals, hospices, senior centers, nursing homes and other health agencies. /2 In historical perspective, it is not unusual for older people to seek out the role of healer. To this day, in many cultures who have deep, ancient roots, women are not encouraged – and sometimes, not allowed – to become healers until they are post-menopausal.

            Today, Therapeutic Touch has been taught in over 100 foreign countries, as well as the United States. Largely because of the unprecedented surge in successful pregnancies during the post-World War II years, which resulted in the “Baby Boomers” who now are becoming elderly, world focus has been on the significantly increasing populations of the advanced aged. This means that there is also a concomitant increase in the health problems to which an aging population is heir, and therefore a future is at hand in which the use of Therapeutic Touch is timely./3

1. D.Krieger. (1975) “Therapeutic Touch: The Imprimatur of Nursing.” American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 75, pp. 784 – 787.
2. ________. Accepting Your Power To Heal: The Personal Practice of Therapeutic

                         Touch. Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1993.

3.   D.Kunz with D.Krieger. The Spiritual Dimensions of Therapeutic Touch. 

                                Rochester, VT. : Bear & Co., 2004.