Complementary Sights and Sounds of Healing
Imagine you're on a beach. You can hear the waves lapping the shore, smell the salt water and feel sand under your toes and warm sunlight on your face.
Hear this: “You will be fine. You will be healthy. You are going to heal.”
Or maybe you're in a drumming circle where the steady beats of primal percussions relieve anxieties and empty your mind, allowing you to think clearly and approach an illness or surgery with fresh resolve.
Guided Imagery, Positive Healing Statements and Drumming for Health are three examples of alternative medicine or integrative therapies making inroads at BWH as complementary applications to traditional clinical treatments. In Nursing, educators are offering courses on these techniques and researching outcomes.
“Many patients are familiar with some of these different therapies and request them as part of their treatment,” said Jeanne Lanchester, RN, Recovery Room in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit. “When requested, we have staff trained to initiate these methods.”
Lanchester is a proponent of Positive Healing Statements, a technique whereby an anesthesiologist or nurse will say affirmations and healing statements as the patient is induced and awakened from anesthesia because these times are the most hypnotic and an opportunity to bring about a positive state of mind that will aid healing. It helps the patient believe that they will recover, heal and get well.
“It can be very powerful,” Lanchester said.
Yolanda Harmuth, BSN, a former Oncology charge nurse who now works as a nurse educator, is an advocate of Guided Imagery to help patients with pain management or ease anxiety in advance of a procedure. “Patients can imagine they're at the beach or in the mountains. It brings them to a more peaceful state to facilitate any procedure,” she said. “It's a healing tool that has been used since ancient civilization.”
Drumming circles, held about once a month at BWH for staff and some patients, date back several centuries, according to Mary Moffat, RN of Care Coordination. “People bring in their own drums and rattles. We drum for 10 minutes, talk for 10 minutes and then drum again for 10 minutes,” she said.
People experiencing recent loss, burdened with stress at work or home or facing complex lifestyle issues may find the uniform beats of drumming circles soothing and relaxing. “It connects you to the creative side of your brain and helps you come up with solutions and insight,” Moffat said. Trauma patients could benefit from drumming, too, as Moffat hopes to bring this technique to the bedside.