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Biofield therapies (BTs) are increasingly employed in contemporary healthcare. In this white paper, we review specific challenges faced by biofield practitioners resulting from a lack of (1) a common scientific definition of BT; (2) common educational standards for BT training (including core competencies for clinical care); (3) collaborative team care education in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and in integrative health and medicine (IHM); (4) a focused agenda in BT research; and (5) standardized devices and scientifically validated mechanisms in biofield research. We present a description of BT and discuss its current status and challenges as an integrative healthcare discipline. To address the challenges cited and to enhance collaboration across disciplines, we propose (1) standardized biofield education that leads to professional licensure and (2) interprofessional education (IPE) competencies in BT training required for licensed healthcare practitioners and encouraged for other practitioners using these therapies. Lastly, we discuss opportunities for growth and a potential strategic agenda to achieve these goals. The Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine (AIHM) provides a unique forum to facilitate development of this emerging discipline, to facilitate IPE, and to further increase the availability of BT to patients.

Therapeutic touch is an energy-based nursing intervention performed with the goals of restoring harmony and balance in the human energy field and helping the patient self-heal. This article discusses the process of therapeutic touch and describes case studies of CCU patients on whom therapeutic touch was used as part of the treatment plan. Therapeutic touch was applied to help stabilize patients, calm agitated and intubated patients, and relieve pain. The experiences related had a calming effect on the practitioner and positive family responses.

trauma—but these patients are also in a mental, emotional, and spiritual crisis. Sedatives only provide a temporary solution. When the drugs wear off, anxiety returns or worsens, The holistic or whole-person model is the major conceptual basis of nursing education programs today but is still viewed as an esoteric term in many medical schools and especially by physicians. The word healing as used in a holistic model is often viewed as something soft and not scientifically based in medicine, but healing is innate, a natural process. A wound starts healing from the inside out after the “curing procedure” such as surgery or drug therapy has taken place. This has been known in nursing since Florence Nightingale postulated it over 100 years ago, yet there is still confusion over the difference between healing and curing.