Energy Medicine: Is this real?

Energy medicine techniques are becoming more mainstream and evidence based practices. These practices can help in a multitude of health and emotional health areas. Nurses Stress 101 Article

Energy Medicine: Is this real?

Hey, did you see the episode on Grey’s Anatomy about energy work?? In this episode Dr. Owen Hunt reluctantly makes an appointment with a therapist based on the recommendation of his sister. His sister, also a physician, had excellent results with overcoming all the trauma endured being in a war zone for 10 years. Dr. Hunt is in the office, ready for his appointment and begins to start the resistance already thinking things like, “This is weird, voo doo, and I just don’t get it”. But again, trusting his sister and knowing she is very happy in her life…. He takes the plunge.

The therapist explained he uses N.E.T (Neuro Emotional Technique) combined with muscle testing. What is this? Basically, muscle testing is used to bypass our conscious mind and access our subconscious mind. Asking questions related to our current “issue” and finding when this problem may have first been programmed into our subconscious mind. Oh how Dr. Hunt was becoming more and more surprised (and scared, ha!) that this muscle testing technique was starting to get closer to his root issue. Finally, it was revealed the issue started at age 10. He remembered he had won a very prestigious award at school and was elated with joy and could hardly wait to get home to share with his family. Once he got home, that excitement was squashed because his mother had to tell him that his father had just passed. He realized, with the therapist’s help, that he had made a decision to not allow himself to have joy. He could not be joyous while his mother was so sad. The pattern was created that anytime he gets close to feeling joy…. bam…. self-sabotage kicks in from that old unresolved pattern. They then continued to clear the energy with an acupressure energy technique which shows Dr. Hunt finally releasing that sadness and (hopefully) beginning a path to joy…..stay tuned

Is this for real? I say yes!! How do I know? I have experienced this myself. My unresolved emotions and past traumas were continually running in my subconscious mind. My issues eventually played out in a multitude of health issues, pain, and a fibromyalgia diagnosis. I felt broken on the inside and felt that it wasn’t okay to be me, so my body responded to the subconscious pattern, “ok, let’s give her something to fix”. I also had many physical traumas from the past that were trapped. Being a tom-boy as a child played a role in my structural pain as an adult! Many of us have heard , “your issues are in your tissues”, and it is absolutely true!

Plus let’s add the emotional and structural trauma I have experienced as a nurse for 20 plus years. I don’t think you realize how affected you may become witnessing or experiencing some of the mild to extreme situations that we do. Over time these experiences can make an impact similar to someone with post traumatic stress if you do not work through, or resolve the emotions of the experience.

I found energy medicine out of desperation and despair, and I would encourage you to look into it now! Are you happy with every aspect of your life, your relationships, your success, or your health? If not, I invite you to look into Emotional Freedom Technique, Neuro Emotional Technique, and just google the heck out of energy medicine!! There is probably some old, unresolved issue preventing you from soaring in the area you would like to fly! Many practices are becoming more mainstream and evidence based. So please consider and be open to resolving your past , diffusing your current, so that you can have a more free future. I believe you are deserving of being the best version of yourself, so you can then serve whomever you choose to the best of your ability and have a joyous life!!

Tammy Hartman ADN, RN, BS I have been a nurse since 1990 and recently turned holistic nurse and energy practitioner, because it works! I am passionate about empowering people about their own health using simple energy techniques.

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Tammy Hartman

About Tammy Hartman

I have been an RN since 1990 and have found through my own trials that Energy medicine can be effective in resolving emotional and physical issues.

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Specializes in Community health.

The word “evidence” doesn’t even appear in this. I’m glad you found something that helps you, but isn’t evidence-based practice (evidence outside of and beyond your own personal experience) the foundation of modern nursing?

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If you have to ask, then...probably not.

I agree with Community. It's great that you've found something that works for you, but anecdotal evidence is pretty meaningless in the medical world (as is seeing something on a medical TV show, since we know they're so accurate). The fact that you're an 'energy practitioner' yourself definitely makes it sound as though you're peddling snake oil for the purpose of validating your own practice in order to achieve personal gain.

I'd be curious to know if there's any actual data out there on the topic; presenting the data along with a thoughtful analysis (in addition to your own story) would have made for a much stronger article.

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Specializes in Critical Care; Cardiac; Professional Development.

I view this with a healthy degree of skepticism but perhaps a little less cynical than the two replies above this one.

I agree that there needs to be evidence. After all, that is the foundation of nursing practice and required to lend credence in our world of Westernized medicine with its science-based values. However, Western cultures are not the only way of viewing the world nor are they the end-all-be-all of healing. One need only look to the East to find other holistic interventions that are unproven by scientific studies. What's more though, we do have studies in our own medical culture that strongly back the idea of a placebo effect. Any number of interventions we apply these days can be traced back to this, over and over again, even those that involve taking a pill every day. Energy work would have a leg up on those interventions, in fact, due to the likely lack of nasty side effects or long-term disruption of the body.

We had a patient once who believed in voodoo. In their culture, a holy man kills a chicken above the patient's body. The evil spirit causing the illness is then drawn into the dead chicken and thrown away with the carcass. I am paraphrasing, of course, but this was problematic in the hospital setting. Killing chickens in the patient's room was distressing to us. Not killing chickens in the patient's room was distressing to them. The patient truthfully did not improve until we found a mutually agreeable compromise. Once a compromise was reached (the placement of fresh dead chicken parts in a bowl in the room daily), the patient got better. Do I trust this method of healing and credit it with the patient's improvement? No, not really. The patient and their family did though. I am not arrogant enough to believe we know everything about the human body or science or the spiritual realm or the body/mind connection. As a spiritual human being, I trust in saying "I have no idea" and, when there is no harm being done, make allowances for my agnostic and limited mind and the fact that we are very, very far from knowing everything there is to know about the body, the mind and the soul.

It occurs to me that EMDR is very well known to work better than anything else when it comes to PTSD and IS proven in studies...and this sounds similar in many ways. Who knows. Maybe one day I will give it a try. There is no proof that "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" works very well either and this sounds a lot more hopeful than that common American theme when it comes to past trauma and, frankly, a LOT less harmful to the psyche in general.

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Specializes in Community health.
9 minutes ago, not.done.yet said:

What's more though, we do have studies in our own medical culture that strongly back the idea of a placebo effect. Any number of interventions we apply these days can be traced back to this, over and over again, even those that involve taking a pill every day. Energy work would have a leg up on those interventions, in fact, due to the likely lack of nasty side effects or long-term disruption of the body.

This is a great point. In my FQHC we have a chiropractor. Now, I’m not really a believer in chiropractic care, and I was all annoyed that we can bill Medicaid for this. Until, upon reflection, I realized that our “real” doctors, when they have a patient with back pain, often prescribe narcotics and/or refer them out for questionable surgeries and injections that are shown not to work. If visiting a chiropractor makes the patients feel better, it is certainly the less harmful of the two alternatives.

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There is no scientific evidence behind this. Placebo, however, can be very effective and some medical treatments are less effective than placebo! The patient should be told you're trying a placebo. Here is an interesting article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/magazine/placebo-effect-medicine.html

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I think it's real.

But I'd only trust someone using it if they went to school in places like Wudang temple in China. But that takes years and years.

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On 4/26/2019 at 4:37 AM, CommunityRNBSN said:

This is a great point. In my FQHC we have a chiropractor. Now, I’m not really a believer in chiropractic care, and I was all annoyed that we can bill Medicaid for this. Until, upon reflection, I realized that our “real” doctors, when they have a patient with back pain, often prescribe narcotics and/or refer them out for questionable surgeries and injections that are shown not to work. If visiting a chiropractor makes the patients feel better, it is certainly the less harmful of the two alternatives.

I am just a student, but previously I was an EMT and worked for 2 years as a physical therapy aide. I can't count the times where we had patients who were in chronic pain for years...and there previous treatment of choice was a chiropractor. Unfortunately many times MDs do prescibe pain medication, that does next to nothing or worse, gets the patient addicted to opiods.

A good Doc will know when a patients issue is out of their scope and refer to a physical therapist. A physical therapist can do everything a chiro can do, plus actual knowledge of ya know...science. I've seen too many patients suffer for years while throwing money at chiro that do nothing.

I'll also add that CBT, meditation and other types of non physical interventions are powerful tools in pain management, but again, there is research and evidence that supports those, and not a lot on " Energy medicine"

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Chiropractic and clinical massage therapy and physical fitness are the only reasons I'm walking. Severe scoliosis, diagnosed at five, Milwaukee brace at 14. I developed drop foot at 27, and a chiro relieved it and chronic debilitating headaches which I thought were migraines, turned out they're due to military neck (straight, no curve, part of scoliosis).

Now almost 30 years later, so so grateful.

If traditional medical folks worked with "alternative medicine" folks, instead of against, we would have a much healthier population.

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