Helping Hands, Healing Hands

Helping Hands, Healing Hands
Virtually every culture other than those in the Western world embraces the concept of chi (also known as prana, qi and others) as an internal energy that has an important role in mental and physical well-being. Western medicine, of course, has been far removed from acknowledging chi, given that it isn't visible... and evidence of its presence and effectiveness is anecdotal. But now in what may be the beginning of a breakthrough on this stance, researchers at Duke University Medical Center and at seven other prominent medical centers around the country conducted a clinical trial to determine if employing internal energy forces and several other cultural norms, including prayer, might have a measurable effect in enhancing healing. The paper was recently published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.

STUDY STRUCTURE
The study participants, 748 patients undergoing possibly life-threatening cardiac procedures, were put into one of four groups -- one received off-site prayer by congregations of various religions... one received MIT therapy (stands for soothing music, guided imagery and touch therapy -- more on that in a minute)... one group received both prayer and MIT... and one group received nothing. While neither patients nor staff knew who was in the prayer group, obviously the MIT patients knew that they were receiving the therapy because it was a bedside activity. The nurses administering MIT worked with the patients before the procedure to teach them abdominal breathing rather than shallow chest breathing, and they had them select from among three types of music (easy listening, soft country or classical) to listen to. They then chose from three selections of imagery that represented the most beautiful place they had been or could imagine. Finally, the specially trained nurses conducted a 20-minute session on touch therapy, which is a hands-on method for moving energy through the body to help patients relax and perhaps enhance healing.

I spoke with Mitchell W. Krucoff, MD, the lead author of the study, who says the study, results showed that patients having off-site prayer, bedside MIT or both prayer and MIT had comparable primary outcomes with regard to death, new signs of heart attack, rehospitalization and several other cardiac disease indicators. There was no difference between the control group versus MIT and prayer. But now it gets really interesting. Both groups of MIT patients, he says, did experience relief of preprocedural distress and at the secondary endpoint -- the second six months after procedure -- MIT patients were 65% less likely to die than those who did not receive it.

Dr. Krucoff stresses that in the statistical setting of multiple comparisons, these numbers are, he says, very interesting but also warrant cautious interpretation. Even so, he tells me that there are more analyses of long-term results to come. This study is just the beginning of further research to find whether such practices have a place for "promoting patient health in the modern medical setting."