what is Healing Touch?

The specific modality I practice - its origins, its methods, and what sets it apart.

When people ask what I do, I say energy healing, because that's the category most people have at least a rough map for. But the specific practice I'm trained in - the one I do in sessions - is called Healing Touch. They're not the same thing, and the difference is worth knowing.

where it came from

Healing Touch was developed in the late 1980s by Janet Mentgen, a nurse in Colorado who had been quietly incorporating energy-based techniques into her clinical care for years before anyone called it a program. She noticed something that nurses tend to notice before almost anyone else: that the quality of presence in a room, the laying of hands, the simple act of sustained, unhurried attention, changed how patients moved through pain and recovery. She wasn't the first person to observe this. But she was one of the first to build a formal curriculum around it.

The American Holistic Nurses Association adopted the Healing Touch program in 1990, and it grew from there. Today it's taught internationally, practiced in hospitals, hospices, cancer centers, and private settings, and backed by a certifying body — Healing Beyond Borders — that maintains research, training standards, and a registry of certified practitioners. It's one of the more structured energy modalities in practice today, in the sense that there's a real body of training behind it, not just an apprenticeship or a weekend intensive.

what actually happens in a session

Healing Touch uses specific, trained hand techniques — some with the hands resting lightly on the body, some with the hands held just above it — to work with what practitioners call the biofield: the organized energy field that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body. Different techniques address different things: some are for clearing and releasing; some for rebalancing when something feels chaotic or congested; some for supporting areas of the body that are depleted or in the middle of healing from something.

What makes Healing Touch distinct, even within energy healing, is the specificity of those techniques. This isn't an intuitive laying-on of hands with no structure behind it. There are named protocols — each with a particular intention, a sequence, a way of moving through the field. Practitioners are trained in when to use which approach. A session isn't improvised from scratch; it's responsive within a real framework.

That said, the work still requires presence, not just procedure. The protocols are the container. What happens inside them depends on the practitioner and the person on the table.

who uses it and where

This is the part that surprises people most: Healing Touch has been integrated into a number of major medical settings. Programs have been offered at places like MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Cleveland Clinic, and various VA hospitals, typically as part of integrative oncology or palliative care. Hospice nurses use it. Labor and delivery nurses have used it. It shows up in surgical recovery rooms and alongside chemotherapy.

This doesn't mean it's standard care — it isn't, and most providers aren't offering it. But it does mean that Healing Touch has been evaluated seriously enough that some institutions have decided it's worth bringing in alongside conventional treatment. That's not nothing, in a medical culture that's rightly skeptical of things it can't measure well.

how it differs from other modalities

The closest neighbors are Reiki and therapeutic touch, and people often ask about the distinctions. A few worth knowing:

• Therapeutic touch was developed separately, in the 1970s, by nurse Dolores Krieger and healer Dora Kunz. It predates Healing Touch and shares the nursing lineage. The techniques overlap in spirit but differ in form.

• Reiki comes from a Japanese tradition (Mikao Usui, early twentieth century) and is channeled differently — through the practitioner's hands as a conduit for universal energy rather than through trained biofield techniques. Both are gentle. Both have value. They're simply different approaches.

• Healing Touch sits in its own lane: nursing-rooted, protocol-based, with a formal training and certification structure, and a particular emphasis on clinical integration.

None of these is inherently better than the others. But if you've tried one and found it wasn't quite right, the differences can matter.

what this means if you're considering a session

I chose Healing Touch because I appreciate having a real framework - specific techniques, a clear scope of practice, a research community, and a certifying body I can point to. The training felt rigorous to me in a way that built confidence, and the nursing heritage resonates. I work with a lot of people walking through medical situations, and the clinical rootedness of this modality feels like the right fit.

Energy healing is a broad category. Healing Touch is a specific practice within it - one with a history, a structure, and a genuine investment in accountability. If you're curious about what that looks like in a session, I'd invite you to read about what a session is actually like, or just reach out and ask. The table is the best explanation.