Each week, Hannah Chapman performs Reiki for 15 minutes at a time on each of the four dogs who make the rounds as part of the Pet Therapy Program at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, PA.
"In general, you come home from a tough day at work and just want to hug your dog or cuddle with your cat. What you’re doing is kind of energetically dumping your bad day onto your pet. But because pets want to make you happy, they don’t mind," says Chapman, who also works as a pathologist assistant at the hospital. "Therapy dogs are getting that times a hundred visiting people. The Reiki helps clean them out and open them up to have more capacity to give, to do what they want to do, which is to be with people."
In the course of doing so, she’s developed a strong bond with the dogs and their owners, especially Buttons, a Pembroke Welsh Corgi, who Chapman helped see through a perforated gastric ulcer that threatened her life.
It was her friends from the pet therapy group who encouraged Chapman to also visit the Neighborhood Hospice Inpatient Unit, which she now visits weekly, providing Reiki to interested patients and their family members. "I’ve had amazing conversation with the family members. Discussions about death and transition take place more frequently in hospice than they do in the hospital. Hospice is so open to any type of therapy—music therapy, the dogs, massage," Chapman notes.
Reiki is, according to the International Center for Reiki Training, an age-old Japanese practice that’s aimed at reducing stress and promoting relaxation and healing. It’s based on the idea that an "unseen life-force energy" flows through each of us. When it runs low, or it’s blocked, we’re more susceptible to stress and illness. When it’s high, that’s when we’re healthy and happiest.
Chapman’s hospice treatments focus on easing anxiety and unfold in largely the same way they would in other settings. The person receiving the treatment lies on a massage table fully clothed, save for their shoes. Reiki can be done with the hands touching the patient’s body or held above the body. A treatment lasts about an hour.
"I tell people receiving Reiki that whatever needs to happen will happen on the table," Chapman says. "If you need to relax and fall asleep, then that’s what will happen. It’s not uncommon for people to cry. The energy helps them release some emotion."
The response to Reiki depends on the individual, though most will describe feeling "lighter" at the end of the treatment, as though a burden’s been removed.
Diagnosis by Intuition
The notion that a spiritual energy is coursing through all of us is not unique to Reiki. Different traditions call it by different names—chi, prana—but their aim is the same; to gauge this energy and supplement a deficiency through the provider or clear a blockage in the energy pathways. When performed successfully, Reiki is believed to instill a sense of serenity, security and enhanced wellbeing.
Holistic practices, along with a host of other therapies that are not generally considered part of conventional medicine, including yoga, music and art therapy, aroma therapy and meditation, have come to be referred to as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Integrative medicine combines conventional and CAM treatments for which there’s evidence of safety and effectiveness.
In recent years, there’s been an appreciable increase in the number of hospitals and hospices offering CAM therapies, a trend that can be attributed largely to patient demand. A 2012 survey by the Health Forum, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association, reported that 42 percent of responding hospitals were providing some form of CAM treatment in 2010, up from 37 percent in 2007. And a 2011 survey found that nearly 42 percent of responding hospice care providers either provided CAM therapies, had a CAM provider on staff or under contract or both. The most popular therapies were massage (71.7 percent), group therapy (69 percent), music therapy (62.2 percent), pet therapy (58.6 percent) and relaxation (52.7 percent).
CAM can be applied to a full spectrum of conditions, but musculoskeletal problems, such as back, neck and joint pain, are the reason most adults say they use a CAM therapy. A 2007 study that analyzed CAM therapies’ impact specifically on breast cancer patients found that they helped reduce "the distress of symptoms and side effects associated with breast cancer and its treatments, as well as the psycho-emotional aspects of coping with this traumatic experience."
"There are four levels of healing: the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual," Chapman says. "Today’s medicine does a great job with physical healing. But Reiki does a better job of tending to the other three."
Heavy is the Weight Held Within
Chapman embodies two mindsets that sometimes conflict. As a pathologist’s assistant, she works in a profession that is grounded in evidence-based results. But she’s also someone who’s explored the aspects of life that aren’t so easily explained.
"I think I’ve always considered myself a spiritual person, not necessarily a religious person," Chapman says.
About two years ago, she was confronted with an experience that forced her to call everything she knew into question. "It was supposed to be a fun afternoon at my house. Test the psychic, see what she knows," Chapman says. "She came in and then there was the day before her and the day after."
Chapman invited Suesie Hartman, a Lancaster-based "master energy healer", into her home for the afternoon to conduct what Hartman calls a "spirit circle" with Chapman’s mother, sister, brother-in-law and herself. It was her Christmas gift to her mother.
“It was like opening up a new world. She did readings on everybody and she was spot-on,” Chapman says. “What really got to me was watching Suesie work with my sister and reach her in a way that no one had been able to in so long.”
Chapman started studying Reiki with Hartman a month later. And within a year, she completed her Reiki and shamanic training—and opened her own studio, where she performs and teaches Reiki.
She traces the shift in her perspective, when the scientific and the spiritual became intertwined, to a morning early on in her Reiki training. After a weekend of class, she headed to work at Chester County Hospital. Suddenly, Chapman was picking up on energetic imbalances in the tissue samples she held and made the connection between the physical manifestation of illness and the energy imbalance. It occurred to her that these imbalances had the capability to make us sick. Which also meant that if we address these imbalances then we have the capability to make ourselves better.
Since she’s been practicing Reiki, Chapman says she’s positively affected her high blood pressure, asthma and irritable bowel syndrome symptoms. "I’ve figured out the emotional reasons, the deeper reasons why those things were out of balance and what the imbalance was trying to teach me," she says.
An Epidemic Spurs a Paradigm Shift
For all of its positive influence and lack of significant drawback, there’s a chasm between CAM therapies and conventional medicine.
A 2010 AARP survey of 1,000 adults age 50-and-older revealed that half were using some form of CAM therapy, yet of this group, only half of these said they had ever discussed CAM with their health care providers. And, in a study published in 2017, over 27,000 patients of the Centers for Complementary Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in Denver were surveyed between 2007 and 2014. Fifty-nine percent reported starting CAM therapy after seeing their primary care physician. Patients felt they needed to supplement the conventional course of treatment for their condition.
But the divide between CAM and conventional medicine is gradually shrinking. In January, new pain assessment and management standards set forth by the Joint Commission, a nonprofit that accredits more than 21,000 U.S. health care organizations and programs, took effect, requiring hospitals to provide non-pharmacological pain treatment options, including acupuncture, chiropractic care and massage therapy, or at least educate their patients about them. The new standards are intended, according to the National University of Health Sciences, to complement conventional treatments and, ultimately, reduce the need for opioid medications.
The move followed a similar gesture by the American College of Physicians in March 2017, which updated its guidelines for low back pain, suggesting physicians first recommend CAM treatments. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the world’s foremost medical research centers, is also expanding research on CAM treatments in hopes of reducing opioid use. Last September, the NIH awarded $14 million in grants to study non-drug approaches to prevent chronic low back pain, including behavioral and coping strategies, mind-body approaches, lifestyle advice and pain education.
In other words, science is beginning to arrive at the same conclusion Chapman discovered: If we listen closely to our bodies, we may be able to find answers about our concerns.
Related Information from Chester County Hospital