Friday, March 31, 2000

Nurse believes in healing power of touch

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        In her 35 years as a registered nurse, Nora Hale has turned time and again to a reliable therapeutic tool: her hands.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        She learned long ago the importance of human touch. Her teachers at St. Elizabeth Hospital School of Nursing in Covington taught her that a simple touch lets patients know someone is there and someone cares.

        And early in her career, Mrs. Hale listened to the advice of a sister-in-law, also a nurse, who said: “You'll do more nursing with tight bedsheets and a back rub and a pillow placed correctly than you will with any needle or fancy piece of equipment.”

        Touching became a small but significant part of what Mrs. Hale did. Through the years, she comforted people who were paralyzed, unconscious or dying. And in 31 years of teaching, she often has reminded her nursing students it's OK to hold a patient's hand.

        But not until six years ago did the 62-year-old Union resident begin to see the power of touch in a different light.

        One day in a nursing home, an excited nursing student said, “Mrs. Hale, you won't believe it. It's really (strange) what the speech therapist made this patient do.”

        The therapist was performing a form of “energy work” on a man who had suffered a major stroke. The patient, who was bent over in a chair and wouldn't lift his head, straightened up within a week after the therapist's touches rebalanced the man's “energy field,” allowing him to relax and heal, Mrs. Hale says.

        “It was like when I was a student getting to watch the birth of a baby for the first time,” the soft-spoken Mrs. Hale says. “It was so overwhelming and awe-inspiring to know you didn't need a needle, you didn't need a pill.”

        Fascinated with what she'd seen, Mrs. Hale began taking classes in alternative therapies, sometimes traveling as far as Cleveland, Tampa, Fla., or Atlanta.

        She met a kindred soul, Peggy Roberts, a certified massage therapist. Four and a half years ago, they opened Holistic Care Therapy in Hebron.

        Mrs. Hale does healing touch, craniosacral therapy and Reiki. Such alternative, or complementary, therapies operate on the belief that a trained practitioner can feel or sense a person's energy field. By altering blockages in that field, Mrs. Hale says, she can help a patient relax or heal.

        Many in the scientific community view such therapies as unproven New Age foolishness. Skeptics include some of the nurses Mrs. Hale works with.

        They sometimes tease her. “Don't talk to me about that touchy-feely stuff,” they say. “If I can't see it, measure it, if it's not in formal medicine ... wave your wand someplace else.”

        Some of Mrs. Hale's clients also have doubts, but they come to her because traditional medicine has not been able to alleviate their chronic pain. In addition to her clients, Mrs. Hale works on members of her family, including her husband of 30 years, Allen.

        She has not abandoned her belief in traditional medicine. “I don't even remotely pretend that I can take the place of a physician,” she says. Having worked alongside doctors for most of her life, she says they are dedicated people who often don't get enough credit.

        She believes holistic therapy complements traditional medicine. “There's a place for both.”

        Just as there is a place for someone with a caring touch.

        “Anybody who goes into medicine, be it a physician or nurse, does so from a basic desire to help people,” she says.

        “I feel like every day that I do something and do it well, I have accomplished something with my life.”

       

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