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Dorothea
Hoover-Kramer
HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS Paperback: 384 pages Publisher: Sounds True, Incorporated. 2011. ISBN-10: 1604074523 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 11/16/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * review: "Practitioners can receive energy through
their heartfelt intentions and send it to a recipient with their hands."
So writes Cyndi Dale, author of THE SUBTLE BODY: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF YOUR ENERGETIC ANATOMY (2009). The sentence quoted above appears in Ms Dale's Foreword to her friend Dorothea Hover-Kramer's HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS (2011). Elsewhere (Ch. 17) Linnie Thomas writes,: "Of the over 200 therapies that I have
investigated within energy medicine, Healing Touch is the best
entry-level program in energy medicine available, and the most
professional."
Linnie Thomas is the author of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENERGY MEDICINE (2010, 568 pp.) . Who will, who should read HEALING TOUCH? -- Allegedly, there are at least two to six million clients or patients who have applied, taught, taken or benefitted from various forms of energy medicine. --Readers of HEALING TOUCH will certainly include thousands of American nurses, the core users of the hand healing techniques described by Dorothea Hover-Kramer. --In addition, users or beneficiaries of Reiki, a different, Buddhism-derived hand healing system, will be curious about how Hover-Kramer's Healing Touch Program (1989) differs from the Reiki revealed in Japan during a Buddhist retreat to Mikao Usui (1914). Novices simply curious about new buzz words involving magnetic medicine, chakras, meridians, Chinese medicine, energy healing, Ayurvedic medicine, auras, bodyfields and other terms will want to add HEALING TOUCH to his or her short list of "must" readings. With so many energy therapies, related associations and web sites now available, each major technique is, perhaps inevitably at this early stage, very teacher specific or author specific. Dr (EdD in Educational Psychology) Hover-Kramer therefore lays out her earned credentials as well as her 30-year healing career, including nothing but successes in relieving headaches or accelerating the healing of wounds, etc. through Healing Touch (HT) , a very concrete program (HTP) widely taught since 1990. Dr Hover-Kramer lays out a brief history of the Healing Touch Program (HTP) and its predecessors such as Therapeutic Touch (TT). The author concedes that evidence to date for the effectiveness of Healing Touch as an alternative to traditional Western diagnosis and chemical and surgical healing is still overwhelmingly anecdotal and episodic. --But there are now, as
well, nearly 100 scientific studies of the emerging field of energy
medicine. And more are on the way.
--In addition NIH (National Institutes of Health) has been studying alternative (non-allopathic) medicines since the 1980s. The NIH's NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Aternative Medicine) has listed seven areas of "adjuncts to conventional medical care." Reiki and Healing Touch fit among NCCAM's area Seven: "Interventions that bring about integration of body and mind such as yoga, prayer, mental and emotional healing, and energy medicine modalities." Not-unrelated bio-electromagnetic applications make up area One. And be it noted that Healing Touch assumes that human bodies are vibrating magnetic fields and that removing obstacles in flows within those fields heals. With many black and white drawings of how and where to place hands in order to heal, HEALING TOUCH is an impressive, simple, easily understandable, not very demanding but rewarding read. Demystification of energy healing and hand healing is what this book is all about. To be effective, a practitioner must above all care for, will the good of, love the person being treated. The rest is a matter of training. This is non-interventive medicine at its promising best. But way out there Healing Touch is -- at the cutting edge of main-stream medicine's rawest, newest frontier. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/452562399.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 11/17/2011 name of review: "Healing Touch is the best entry-level program in energy medicine available" (Linnie Thomas) rating: * * * * review: Do you know little more about "energy medicine" or "vibrational medicine" or "Therapeutic Touch (TT)" than that they are buzz words about ancient Eastern holistic health concepts being rapidly taken into or at least given a fair hearing within Western medicine as alternatives to or complements of healing through chemicals or surgery? If you are among thousands of readers merely curious to flesh out what you have vaguely heard so far, then here is a good book for you to get started: HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS (2011) by Dorothea Hover-Kramer, EdD in educational psychology. Energy medicine is way, way out there on the rapidly expanding frontier of supplementary or non-traditional forms of healing noted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Some of its critics accuse it of mumbo jumbo quakery. But its devotees say that their hands have improved the holistic health of thousands. Author Hover-Kramer asserts that the different forms of energy medicine, including her own "Healing Touch (HT)" now number nearly 250. Certified Healing Touch Practitioner Linnie Thomas is the author of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENERGY MEDICINE (2010, 568 pp.) In Chapter 17 of Hover-Kramer's book, Thomas is quoted: "Of the over 200
therapies that I have investigated within energy medicine, Healing
Touch is the best entry-level program in energy medicine available, and
the most professional."
Before I read HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS, my knowledge of this field was as close to zero as you can get. There was nothing I could point to beyond my recently begun treatment for back pain via a combination of Pilates and a smattering of hands-therapy Reiki. Thanks to this book, I might now gingerly dare to call myself at least a beginning novice in healing touch history, theory and hands on techniques. I neither support nor reject Linnie Thomas about Healing Touch's status as the best entry-level energy healing technique or the most professional. But this I do know: Dorothea Hover-Kramer's book stands out as an easily read introduction to energy medicine in general and to her own chosen form in particular -- the Healing Touch Program (HTP). The Healing Touch Program's emphasis on obtaining recognition of acquired skills through juried certifications and researching to high scientific, historical and ethical standards leaps out from every page. The movement's being further rooted in the experiences of hard working, caring nurses in clinics and hospitals also gives hope that this discipline is grounded in pragmatic realities. Let me close by emphasizing how new is the Healing Touch Program (HTP) -- first codified in 1989 --, how slim is the scientific literature supporting it and how few are its certified practitioners (around 4,000), and people who have attended at least one HT class (100,000). Dr Hover-Kramer's book is good at demystifying her form of energy medicine. It purports to be notably more secular than Buddhism-inspired Reiki or theosophy-related Therapeutic Touch (TT). The author declares herself sceptical but not cynical about HT's healthy outcomes through channeling energy. She invokes evidence of electro-magnetic fields in and near human bodies as a tentative explanation of why HT works. She also draws on TT's interest in quantum physics. In her decades of healing practice Dr Hover-Kramer has personally experienced successes and nothing but successs while "centering," directing good thoughts to the client, applying amply illustrated hand positions and movements and then serenely leaving the results of her intervention to the client's body to work out for itself. But the author insists that her results must be replicated by others under the controlled conditions of science before becoming as popularly accepted as, say, hip replacements or cosmetic surgery. We are encouraged to try energy medicine while never neglecting the diagnoses and procedures of Greco-Roman-Western medicine. HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS is strikingly modest in intent and understated in its claims. The book seems, indeed, what Linnie Thomas asserts: a notably good description of an "entry-level program in energy medicine." -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Dorothea_Hover_Kramer _HEALING_TOUCH_ESSENTIAL_ENERGY_MEDICINE_FOR_YOURSELF_ AND_OTHERS-74-1781650-215436-_Healing_Touch_is_the_best_entry_ level_program_in.html =-=-=--=-=-= (3) bn.com 11/19/2011 title of review: Acquire basic Healing Touch (HT) Skills. Prepare to share them with others. reviewer's rating of HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS * * * * REVIEW: You may already have heard of varieties of energy medicine such as Reiki or Therapeutic Touch. Yet another and newer entrant is "Healing Touch." Its principles were codified in 1979 as "The Healing Touch Program (HTP)" and it has been systematically taught in America and thirty-some countries around the world. Its story is told in HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS (2011) by German-born Dorothea Hover-Kramer, EdD (in Educational Psychology). HTP prides itself on seeking and underwriting scientific research for understanding why healing through energy transferred from hands of a practitioner to body or biofield of a client actually works. That healing hands works seems indisputable to author Hover-Kramer and four thousand-plus systematically trained HT practitioners. But why and how it works remains unclear. Hover-Kramer thinks that HT works because it is in harmony with certain of Albert Einstein's personal notions, with advances in quantum physics, indeterminism and in electro-magnetic theories and derivative medical treatments in vibrational medicine such as EMC (elecromagnetic cardiogram) or SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) (Ch. 5). Healing Touch and its +/- 249 energy healing companions are taken seriously by the National Institutes of Health and are seen by many as at the cutting edge of a new frontier in medicine where ancient Eastern healing through caring hands meets hard-headed, skeptical, science-based pharmacology, diagnosis and surgery. Healing Touch is holistic, treats the whole human being, not just his body. Its hard core practitioners and supporters are mainly nurses, caring people whose hands have, through HTP training, become conduits for love of neighbors in pain, any kind of pain. HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS is a book clearly organized, well written for the general public and is a fine first step into the perhaps unfamiliar world of energy medicine. The author presents and illustrates hand positions and healing exercises. The book's message boils down to this: healing touch is a teachable, non-mystic, non-invasive art. Scientific understanding of why HT works is in its infancy, but not negligible. Learn HT well. Apply it to yourself and to others with confidence and anticipate perceptible good results. -OOO- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/healing-touch -dorothea-edd-rn-dcep-hover-kramer-edd-rn- dcep/1100404984?ean=9781604074529&itm= 1&usri=dorothea%252bhover-kramer =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 11/19/2011 title of review: "Healing Touch": rapidly secularizing, yet it comes "trailing clouds of glory ... from God, who is our home." rating: * * * * review: Biofield! Chakras!
Magnetic Fields! Center! Ground! Teach your hands to heal through
Magnetic Passes, Laser and Ultrasound!
Those are some key buzz words of the Healing Touch Program (HTP), codified in 1979 and widely and systematically promoted and taught since 1980. By now 100,000 people have had some classroom exposure to HTP and 4,000 have qualified -- after passing through five levels of training -- as "Practitioners." All this and much more is yours for the reading of HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS (2011) by Dorothea Hover-Kramer, EdD (in educational psychology) Therein we learn that as of 2011 there are around 250 modalities of "energy" medicine being followed by the National Institutes of Health. Healing Touch (HT) and its systematized Healing Touch Program (HTP) are among those modalities. Linnie Thomas is the author of The Encyclopedia of Energy Medicine (2010, 568 pp.) In Chapter 17 of Hover-Kramer's book, Thomas is quoted: "Of the over 200 therapies that I have investigated within energy medicine, Healing Touch is the best entry-level program in energy medicine available, and the most professional." For millennia people have been healing themselves and others through moving their hands on or above the human body. There is a tendency even today for a moving hands healing system to begin in religion or metaphysical mysticism and then become progressively more secular and scientific. -- Thus, Reiki was developed in Japan by Dr
Mikao Usui while brooding during a Buddhist retreat in 1914 on how to
transfer healing energy through his hands without diminishing his own
vital energy.
-- Therapeutic Touch (TT) was codified in 1972 at the Pumpkin Hollow Theosophist retreat center in the Berkshires of New York. -- Before she became an adjunct founder of the Healing Touch Program, Dorothea Hover-Kramer studied Therapeutic Touch. Did that experience with TT induce the author to style herself in religious overtones "a founding elder of Healing Touch?" William Wordsworth (See this Ode: "Intimations Of Immortality" from Recollections Of Early Childhood) would understand this sense of the divine still lingering over increasingly secular healing modalities: "...trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home." Increasingly, healers in the mould of Hover-Kramer are finding that their new energy healing disciplines must stand or fall through convincing readers and potential users that Reiki, TT, HT, etc., etc. are grounded in hard science, are being vigorously researched and that someday we will understand why and how these forms of healing achieve their fiercely asserted successes. Thus Hover-Kramer finds HT and the HTP compatible with Einstein's belief in "subtle energies," with quantum theory in physics, electro-magnetic fields and related non-invasive medical interventions via a SQUID, "superconducting quantum interference device"). Throughout, the author makes clear her experience-based belief that healing touch works, even if we do not yet understand why. A sense of religious awe or reverence pervades Dr Hover-Kramer's HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS. Consider the five page glossary and terms like aura, chakra, Higher
Power, Higher Sense Perception (HSP), life essence, meditation,
spiritual practice, transpersonal consciousness and wholeness.
We feel as if entering an ancient healing temple, a shrine lovingly tended by priestesses (mostly nurses) who have learned how to pull themselves together quickly in a crisis (centering) and then project their healing love upon our hurts both physical and emotional. Dr Hover-Kramer has produced a remarkably good book. Its content is dense, sometimes deep. But her expository technique is leisurely and calmly to spread examples and illustrations of hands healing, allusions to science and research and much more across 17 chapters, Notes, Glossary, Suggestions for Further Reading, Leading Energy Medicine Resources, Index and About the Author. Let me also note in passing that Hover-Kramer stresses ethical standards and moral behavior as hallmarks of HTP. In many ways this is an absolutely delightful book. It is surprisingly modest. The author says that she is skeptical about Healing Touch, albeit far from cynical. And this kindly "founding elder" even gives us three titles to chose among that we have earned after we have finishing reading her book: "a student of HT," "energy health
facilitator" or "HT novice
care-giver" (Ch. 14).
Now, that was painless, wasn' it? Viva Healing Touch! I do want to learn more. Thank you Dr Dorothea Hover-Kramer! -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Touch-Essential -Medicine-Yourself/dp/1604074523/ref=sr_1_1?s =books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320956574&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) EPINIONS 11/20/2011 Review Title: Energy Therapy Fills A Huge Gap in Current Medical Care Reviewer's Rating of Dorothea Hover-Kramer - HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS (2011) * * * * * Pros: The author presents successes of non-invasive low-tech healing through hands and good intentions Cons: Does "healing touch" work? Very likely. Why does it work? Still an open question. The Bottom Line: Think of
"Healing Touch" (HT) as a trademark for one of 250 "energy
therapies."
This book shows that HT works. This book also asks why. REVIEW: Hundreds of thousands of people -- perhaps millions -- firmly believe that they have the power to relieve human pain through a combination of loving their ailing neighbors and sending energy out to them through their hands. Since 1991 NIH (The National Institutes of Health) has taken healing touch and other non-Western or non-traditional and folk medicines seriously enough to keep an eye on and research them first through its OAM (Office of Alternative Medicine) and since 1998 through its renamed and bureaucratically upgraded NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine). You are invited painlessly to enter this rapidly expanding universe of "CAM" (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) by opening the pages and reading to the end a book published in 2011 called HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS. Its author is much published nurse and psychotherapist (EdD in educational psychology) Dorothea Hover-Kramer. In her calm, low-key, unpushy book you learn quite a bit of the author herself: in World War II young Dorothea and her family endured saturation bombings in Berlin; she is a grandmother; she has decades of hands on energy oriented healing experience wth nary a single experience of "failure," and more. Within CAM the author's own "Healing Touch" (HT) and "Healing Touch Program" (HTP) -- codified in 1979, widely taught since 1980 -- fall within an NIH sub-category called ENERGY THERAPIES, "such as qigong, reiki, therapeutic touch,
and electromagnetic therapy."
The NIH has so far noticed and named roughly 250 energy therapies. The far wider field of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is used by more than 120 million Americans, an estimated 38% of the population. CAM is a hard field to hold together in one unifying idea. What it basically is not is old-timey allo-pathic Western medicine dating back to the Greek Hippocrates, with its traditions of rational diagnosis and treatment of human bodies and their woes by chemicals and surgery. CAM (including HT and HTP) is non-invasive, low-tech, low cost and virtually devoid of dependence on hardware such as EKGs or SQUIDs ("superconducting quantum interference devices" -- see Hover-Kramer, Ch. 5). Dr Dorothea Hover-Kramer was a nurse before she did systematic energy therapy. And many of the 4,000 approved practitioners of Healing Touch who have been trained in the HT Program are also nurses. Why do
they believe in and use HT?
-- Because they see it work
to heal wounds faster, to lower anxiety of patients in hospitals before
and after surgery; from their non-massaging hands come abolition or
decreasing of temporary or chronic pain.
--And for many hands-healers, the mere pragmatic experience of hands-on success is enough. I personally know hand healers of that persuasion. They simply do not care why energy therapy works. -- For others there has to be a better explanation. For many that explanation is God or Higher Consciousness using their willing, trained or untrained, human hands as a conduit to the kind of healing that Jesus of Nazareth once did. --For still others HT must be subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny via double-blinds, random sampling, repeatable experiments, etc. Hover-Kramer calls herself a skeptic when it comes to Healing Therapy. But she also acknowledges that there are "cynics," people who won't believe any amount of anecdotal evidence, including Hover-Kramer's own, which is scattered about in HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS. I first read HEALING TOUCH in about four hours, filling 20 3" X 5" cards back and front with my notes. I then wrote my first four reviews in which I rated the book 4.4 stars on a scale of 5, rounding down to 4 stars. After a more probing rereading I am now inclined to rate HEALING TOUCH 4.7 stars, rounding to 5 stars. There are so many of its sources that I want to look into, especially the roughly 100 scientific papers referred to. The book's approach and layout have grown on me. It does no harm that its 18-page topical and name INDEX may be the best, easiest to use and most helpful index I have read in decades. HEALING TOUCH is pitched to a very general readership that includes cynics, skeptics, seekers, nurses, psychologists, people seeking relief from emotional or physical pain, Theosophists (Healing Touch's direct antecedent, Therapeutic Touch or TT was codified in 1972 at the Pumpkin Hollow Theosophist retreat center in New York's Berkshires), people familiar with Reiki (a product of one Japanese Buddhist's enlightenment in 1914), scientists and researchers. And I cannot deny that there is much of value in this book for each of those types of reader. You will find in HEALING TOUCH: ESSENTIAL ENERGY MEDICINE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS 17 easily read chapters gridded across four parts. In those parts you will move easily at your own pace into descriptions of energy healing, its history, its successes and its question marks. You will be shown many black and white drawings of how to position hands. You will linger over Dorothea Hover-Kramer's Chapter Five: "Scientific Support for Energy Medicine." Therein she strives by might and main to make her HT a natural complement to today's "vibrational medicine" with its computerized tomography, positive emission tomography, etc. You will read her speculations that Healing Touch works because it harmonizes with Albert Einstein's notion of "subtle energies," with physics' quantum theory and Heisenberg's uncertainty theory, not to mention the whole field of electro-magnetism and recent discoveries of the role of magnetic fields in human bodies. Part Four is called "Your Next Steps." If the author has captured your interest, she now shows you how to seek out like-minded caregivers and healers. She tells you whom to contact in the Healing Touch Program itself and how to move through its various training stages toward recognized accreditation. Two notes run through this fine book: hard thinking can only
improve Healing Touch (HT)
and HT must adhere to high ethical standards (permissions from clients to touch this or that body part, and more). In this review, I have declined to drown you in HT's special jargon or its lingering mystical or religious overtones. These you will notice quickly enough in the five page glossary (e.g. aura, biofield, centering, chakra, grounding, Higher Power, life essence, meditation, and more). The unobtrusive but up-to-date nine pages of End Notes adequately document claims and sources of Healing Touch and energy medicine. I leave you with two thoughts that stay with me from the book's text: -- In Chapter Six the author
synopsizes six recent scientific
studies of healing touch therapies -- I assume the very best and
most persuasive that she can find. She defends research and gently
rebukes incurious practitioners who consider testing and research
unnecessary. Maybe practitioners are of that opinion, but insurance
companies and Medicare assuredly are not!
-- Finally, In Chapter 17 of Hover-Kramer's book, a suasive authority is quoted. He is Certified Healing Touch Practitioner Linnie Thomas, author of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENERGY MEDICINE (2010, 568 pp.) Thomas says: "Of the over 200 therapies that I have investigated within energy medicine, Healing Touch is the best entry-level program in energy medicine available, and the most professional." -OOO- Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/reviews/Dorothea_Hover_Kramer_ Healing_Touch_Essential_Energy_Medicine_for_Yourself _and_Others_epi =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= EXTRAS: http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Energy-Medicine -Linnie-Thomas/dp/1577492374/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_1 http://nccam.nih.gov/health/whatiscam/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Complementary_ and_Alternative_Medicine#Organization_and_history |