A Look at Northfield Medicine: A Touch of Healing

There’s a quiet revolution going on in medicine, and southeast Minnesota is at its epicenter. While a national debate rages over health care options and costs, many here are quietly turning to what is often called alternative medicine to supplement, if not supplant, more conventional therapies.          

Partially driven by consumer demand, such venerable medical establishments as the Mayo Clinic have begun incorporating aspects of integrative medicine in their treatments, and spreading the word via their websites and newsletters. Last year the second, updated edition of The Mayo Clinic Book of Alternative Medicine was published. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, regularly spreads the gospel to his and Oprah Winfrey’s viewers.

What is complementary and alternative, or integrative, medicine?  It includes such modalities as homeopathy, naturopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, herbalism and nutritional-based therapies such as Ayurveda, according to the American National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). It differs from mainstream, American Medical Association-dictated medical practice in that:

• Based on quantum, versus Newtonian physics, it views the body as a dynamic energy system, not as a bio-machine.

• It believes that emotion and spirit can influence illness or health via energetic and neuro-hormonal connections among body, mind and spirit.

• It seeks to re-balance the body to maximize wellness, rather than “fix” illness.

Though it is said that integrative medicine has had only limited clinical study, scientific investigation is beginning to address this gap, and the boundaries between it and more traditional practices is beginning to blur. Seventy-five percent of Americans older than 18 have used some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).  Medical schools are breaking free of the AMA mold:  60 percent of the nation’s medical schools now include CAM courses in their curriculum.

Northfield is noted as a progressive community, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in the number of holistic practitioners; a local publisher puts out an annual guide to help keep track of the myriad masseurs, chiropractors, Reiki masters and acupuncturists in and around our city limits.

Northfield Patch will present a series of profiles of local integrative health practitioners, explaining what they do and exploring the ways in which Northfield is weaving a new web of holistic health care that is more inclusive, less intrusive—and abundantly available in our backyard.

A LOOK AT HEALING TOUCH

Healing Touch—also known as Therapeutic Touch—is the best known of complementary medicine’s hands-on modalities.

The laying on of hands has a long human history; 15,000-year-old paintings in the Pyrenees depict it, early Christians used it, and whose mother couldn’t comfort by kissing a boo-boo to make it better?  Science says that touch is as essential as air or food; babies die without it. Adults are starved for it in our touch-phobic society, yet substitute by spending $200 billion annually on anxiety drugs.

While much of the medical establishment is still skeptical of its benefits, Healing Touch has become increasingly popular in the United States and worldwide, even as scientific evidence accrues to confirm anecdotal evidence.

Developed by nurses Dora Kunz and Dolores Krieger in the 1970s, Healing Touch is used by more than 86,000 nurses and other health professionals in private practice nationwide. More than 100 hospitals have confirmed its effectiveness in a variety of conditions, including speeding wound healing and lessening post surgical pain, reducing the impact of osteoarthritis and migraine headaches, and easing the pain, nausea, depression and anxiety of cancer patients.

Studies have shown that this reduction of pain and stress greatly enhance healing and improve overall quality of life, even for the dying. It also empowers patients by placing them at the center of their own wellness.

“It’s considered energy therapy, and it affects your mental, emotional, and physical energy fields,” says Sherri Bunch Quaas, one of two certified Healing Touch practitioners in Northfield. “We all have those fields in and around our bodies, and Healing Touch helps us balance them."

Requiring little or no special equipment, HT is also portable; Quaas, who has conducted a private practice in her home for nearly nine years, also takes her skills to clients’ homes, and has visiting privileges at . 

Like other forms of complementary medicine, HT works on the principle that the human body is more like an intelligent mind/body/spirit system of electromagnetic energy that maintains itself in a healthy balance than a simple bio-machine made of matter whose parts are prone to breaking down.

Practitioners like Quaas are trained to detect disruptions in this energy flow, and get it moving smoothly again.

How can someone feel with one’s hands whether another’s energy is too low, blocked, or out of balance?

“It’s something you have to learn,” says Quaas, explaining that “natural intuitives” like herself are drawn to the field out of compassion and a desire to heal, but must also complete a five level course—much like nursing training—to be certified to practice. “We all sense it differently. It could be a sensation of cold, with pain, or of heat with inflamed injuries. It could be vibrations. You have to learn your own style of sensing.”

Finding a fit

Healing Touch is most useful as an adjunct—not an alternative—to allopathic medicine, particularly with ailments that tend to fall through the cracks of traditional treatment, such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

“I had fibromyalgia so badly for 10 years that I couldn’t walk a city block or turn a window crank back when it was not even considered a disease,” says Quaas. “I did everything Western medicine said to do, yet I wasn’t getting better. But I had a strong will: I had always been very fit, and it didn’t make sense to me that I could get this disease and couldn’t improve myself.”

She got proactive.

“I educated myself about the disease, and ended up leading support groups at Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis and at Faribault Hospital for about four years. I did a lot of alternative things, like acupuncture, massage, Reiki, Rosen, and bio-magnetic things," Quaas said.

All of these helped, she says, “Until I hit a plateau.”

Then the miracle happened.                                                                                                

“After 10 years, the fibromyalgia left one day. It was just gone. My energy was back," Quaas said. "I was a new person in a new body, and I no longer needed any of my meds.”

What happened? 

“I had raised the vibration of my body by doing all these things so that the disease could no longer stay in my body,” says Quaas.

A healer was born.

“At the time the fibromyalgia left my body, I knew I had to figure out why it left, and that I also had to give back.”

Setting a new course

Quaas studied the spectrum of complementary medicine modalities, and eventually completed all five levels of Healing Touch certification.

“This is what truly connects with me,” she says, because she believes that recognizing and releasing an emotional block empowered her to break through her illness and restore her own health.

While Healing Touch practitioners take a standard medical history, they are also attuned  to clients’ mental, emotional and spiritua issues.

“We really look at the emotional connection with the pain or disease; usually there’s an emotional connection—even if the injury comes from an accident,” says Quaas. “We believe in empowering the client, not making them dependent on us, so we help them be clear about what they expect from the treatment,” says Quaas. “It’s also my opportunity to share what I know about overall wellness, including nutrition and exercise—my intuition will tell me what to say. The idea is not to treat an isolated problem, but to restore balance.”

Balance begins with the practitioner, who spends a few moments in quiet meditation to focus her own energy before setting to work.  She then passes her hand several inches from the client’s body to see where the energy field is broken or congested. Then the hands are passed over both sides of the body in sweeping motions, to release any blocked energy. Where there is a perceived deficit of energy, she places her hands over these weak spots, directing energy to flow there.

Such intensive energy work can be more draining to the healer than, say, ordering an MRI or writing a prescription.

“We practitioners have to receive energy work ourselves to stay in balance,” Quaas says. "We have to lead a balanced life, and not too many practitioners do this work from 8 to 5, five days a week—we have to set our schedule according to how we can maintain our energy, and we seek out other practitioners that work on us.”

(Northfield has so many such healers that an informal barter system for such services has evolved.)

An individual touch

While the number of treatments needed to see results varies with each person and their presenting issues, Quaas says she has seen “remarkable turnarounds” in just one session.

Practitioners don’t promise prompt results, but it does happen.

”I had vertigo so severe that I couldn’t go to work,” says Judy Anderson, 67, a retired factory worker. “After only five sessions, I was free enough of pain to return to work,” and to her active lifestyle, she says. 

She still has HT about once a month for other issues, including carpal tunnel syndrome, but also because it makes her feel better. 

“I can feel the energy flowing through my system,” she says, “And I’m much more relaxed.”

As with traditional medicine, Healing Touch practitioners tend to specialize.

Though people come to her for everything from headaches to hernias, Quaas says she's particularly good at working on backs.

She is also excited about the efficacy of Healing Touch in treating autism, ADD and ADHD in school children without drugs.

Healing Touch has no side effects, and is so safe that non-certified persons can be taught to perform a limited version of it. Quaas trains individuals to practice on themselves, their family and friends to ease minor ailments—often with surprising results.

“There was a group of parolees who took part—under protest—in an experimental group set up by the county to test the benefits of Healing Touch,” says Quaas. “They changed their mindset in just one session. They were feeling so good about learning how to do something positive for someone else; they couldn’t wait to go home and share. 

“It was like taking a first-aid class,” Quaas continued. “They learned that by changing their energy fields, they could get rid of a headache or a backache without medication—legal or otherwise.”

Quaas also plans to extend her outreach to a group for whom the quality of life issue—something scientific tests can’t quantify—is particularly poignant: the terminally ill.

“Here is where can see real benefit of HT to clients and their families,” she says. “People can deeply relax and be much more comfortable so they can spend quality time with their loved ones at the end of their life."