Future Medicine by Cohen Michael Howard;

Author:Cohen, Michael Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Notions of caring, loving, healing, and sacred sensitive touch already exist in many complementary and alternative medical professions. Disciplines such as acupuncture and traditional oriental medicine suggest that the body is energetically linked by a series of pathways known as meridians. For example, if the caregiver presses a point anywhere on the body along the lung meridian, this touch should have an effect on the patient’s overall health relative to the lungs. Hand, foot, and ear reflexology are based on similar correspondences among points along the body. Therefore, any time the caregiver touches the patient’s body, this touch has ripple energetic effects on various organs, meridians, and other subtle pathways in the patient’s consciousness. From the healer’s perspective, entering a room creates a vibratory effect that travels along bioenergetic cords to the chakras and energy bodies of the patient. The medium is the message. The healer is always transmitting himself or herself. Energy healing explains this on the level of the biofield. Fundamentally, the health care provider’s presence—his or her level of consciousness, or state of being—uniquely energizes, potentiates, and radiates the process of healing.

“Touch” as Deeper Contact

Touch, at its ultimate level, is metaphor: what we touch is what we most profoundly consider to be real. Touch involves mental, emotional, and spiritual, as well as physical and social connection; touch implies connection between forms of consciousness. An advertisement for telephone services puts it this way: “Reach out and touch someone, reach out and just say ‘hi.’”

The possibility for deeper contact at all levels that energy healing presents implies the possibility not only of increased, sacred connection between clinician and patient but also of increased connection between the provider and realms of consciousness previously deemed outside the realm of conventional care. One might ask a number of questions regarding the potential implications of this touch: To what extent does touch occur on subtle levels, inaccessible to the ordinary senses, hidden from scientific instrumentation? To what extent is it felt rather than analyzed, perceived rather than measured, acknowledged in the heart and spirit rather than captured on videotape? Why does Therapeutic Touch refer to this with the seeming oxymoron, “noncontact touch?” What are the contours of this world, and what are its implications for health care generally (for example, as in intuitive diagnosis, discussed in chap. 4) or for the psychospiritual evolution of the human organism (in other words, the regulatory goal of transformation)? To what extent can “anecdotal evidence”—reports of internal experience—furnish helpful description of the workings of this dimension of connection, communication, and care?

In exploring such questions, it may be necessary to suspend the usual contours of discussion. Specifically, while more research may be required to make definitive scientific claims regarding the extent of (and mechanism for) so-called extrasensory perception, the question of how healers use subtle senses to access information ordinarily hidden to the health care provider is vital to understanding some of the broader social—as well as clinical—implications of energy healing. This means drawing on reported human experience to begin mapping the “wireless coconut,” the state of mind in which others’ thoughts converge.

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