Is Healing Touch International or Therapeutic Touch At Your Parish?

Healing Touch International or HTI is an international organization founded in 1993 by Janet Mentgen and Linda Smith, two nurses who desired to bring the influence of New Age "energy channeling" techniques to hospitals, schools and parishes worldwide. 

The HTI web site (http://www.healingtouch.net/othrptog/spirit/proginfo.htm) describes the technique as "energy based healing therapies from a Judeo-Christian perspective".  They teach ways to "integrate Healing Touch into church/parish healing ministry".

The site claims that "parish nurses, prayer teams and clergy alike are using this work to bring about God's healing compassion".  Courses include the study of  "self hypnosis...recognizing naturalistic trances…hypno-therapeutic techniques...& energetic patterning".   The program of study is an eclectic blending of energetic techniques of a number of well-known healers, including Dolores Kreiger's "Therapeutic Touch". "Healing Touch"  teaches the use of one's hands and will to influence health at physical, emotional, mental, and/or spiritual levels.  "Therapeutic Touch" was developed by Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N., (Professor Emerita of New York University) and her mentor, Dora Kunz, in the early '70s.  TT is now practiced by thousands of health care professionals and is popular in many hospitals and nursing homes. The technique is taught at scores of universities and hospitals.

A book entitled, Healing Touch: A Resource for Health Care Professionals, by Hover-Kramer & Mentgen, describes Healing Touch's energy-based healing and provides descriptions of the layers of the human energy field and energy centers.  The web site also sells a musical tape of repeated mantras (Hindu chants) of peace and healing. 

The main resource page of the web site has as its principal recommended text, Hands of Light, by Barbara Brennan (the inspiration of this technique and the most well known New Age "healer" in the U.S.).   The rest of the recommended texts on the web site include books on Theosophy, Eastern thinkers and New Age leaders, representing a mix of eastern and Gnostic traditions. 

What is Healing Touch?  It is a newer version of a dangerous and spiritually invasive system of energy  manipulation which may be legitimately described as magic.  How is it a magical art?  Using a distortion of eastern mysticism, now become occult techniques, New Age healers attempt to manipulate matter through an act of the will.  Most New Age "energy techniques" and "healing modalities", as they are called, are forms of this magic.

In the case of HTI, this magical art has now been modified and disguised for Christian ministries, schools and hospitals.  Many hybrid forms of "energy channeling" have grown from the earlier versions of such techniques as yoga, the "healing science" of Barbara Brennan and Reiki.  Therapeutic Touch and its offshoot, Healing Touch, are just two of these variations.

Real healing is never a technique.  Real healers never take mini-courses or charge money.  Real healers do not use "energy".  If you know a hospital, school nurse or member of a parish pastoral team promulgating these techniques, please pass this article on to their bishop.

For more information, check this linked article by Dr. Stephen Barrett, Therapeutic Touch.