Therapeutic
Sensations
Do you know autogenic training or do you practice Qi Gong? Have you ever had acupuncture? Then you probably know the phenomenon of therapeutic sensations from your own experience. The term describes physical sensations, such as warmth, tingling, pressure, numbness, and flowing, that occur as part of mind-body therapies or exercises. In addition to the above, this group also includes yoga, meditation, acupressure, certain forms of massage and manual therapy, various relaxation exercises, as well as Reiki and other forms of the laying on of hands. Body-oriented psychotherapy, with its very different procedures, also knows therapeutic sensations. There they are called vegetative flow.
On the one hand, therapeutic sensations can occur in people who train or are treated. On the other hand, many practitioners * feel similar sensations, for example when you insert the needles during acupuncture or when you lay hands on patients. The following quotes illustrate this. They come from various scientific studies (see here ) in which people were asked about their feelings in connection with certain therapies.
"I feel a feeling of peace, calm and warmth all over my body when I enter the room. It's a tingling feeling that flows over me like a current."
"It's a pretty bizarre feeling that I've never had before."
"A feeling of warmth and tingling in the limbs. This is usually during treatment, but not immediately. It takes a few minutes ..."
Patient after sham acupuncture treatment;
from Kerr et al. 2011
There are similar descriptions from countless other therapy and exercise systems. So, while it is a common phenomenon, modern medicine is hardly interested in it. At best, unusual sensations are a curiosity there, for example when they appear as a symptom of a mental illness (as so-called coenesthesia). In general, since the triumphant advance of high-tech diagnostics, descriptions of physical sensations as expressed by patients have hardly had any meaning. Since they are naturally subjective and therefore difficult to measure, they simply do not meet the requirements of evidence-based medicine.
At the Insula Institute, we study therapeutic sensations because we are convinced that they are of central importance in understanding both traditional medical systems and modern body-oriented therapies. The key is in their dimension of meaning, in what people associate with them. Have you ever asked yourself why there is so much talk of energy in medicine when you leave the field of conventional medicine? The reason is that many traditional therapy systems postulate a kind of life energy that flows through our body. From a scientific point of view, one would like to banish such ideas into the realm of fantasy, since there has been no recognized experimental evidence of any form of life energy. So-called vitalism, i.e. the idea that things belong to living or dead matter depending on whether they contain a "vital substance", has long been considered obsolete. But why do so many people still believe in it?
This is where the therapeutic sensations come into play. If you ask therapists of the above-mentioned medical systems or their patients how they know that energy flows through their bodies during therapy, the answer very often is "Because I can feel it." The descriptions are strikingly similar and mostly amount to sensations of warmth, tingling, pressure or flow, which these people intuitively associate with energetic processes. But more complex sensations, such as "wind blowing through the body", are not uncommon, as the following quotes show.
"I had the impression that I could control a subtle tingling sensation, a flow of energy, through my whole body."
Practitioners of the
Vipassana meditation;
from Smolka 2017
"You can feel the wind turning in your body ... it was like she was chasing the wind around my body."
"I always felt the warmth pouring out of the therapist's hands, in every session I felt it."
Associations like that of the wind may be difficult to understand at first if you have never felt anything similar yourself. However, they are by no means isolated. Scientifically, however, they are of great importance in order to approach certain concepts of traditional medicine in terms of content. If today's patients associate the sensations during therapy with wind, it is at least conceivable that thousands of years ago healers were stimulated by similar descriptions of their patients to certain ideas, which then turn into theories that are difficult to understand from today's perspective, like the wind as the cause of illness. Under certain circumstances, completely new approaches to scientific investigation open up here.
Another reason why therapeutic sensations are of great importance in understanding traditional medicine is the similarity of their physical patterns to certain theoretical elements that are often misunderstood by modern science, as they cannot be translated 1: 1 into anatomical structures . These include the channels of Chinese medicine (chin .: 脈, mai or 经络, jingluo) or the chakras (Sanskrit: चक्र, chakra) of Hindu or Buddhist meditation.
To recognize this similarity, however, one must first make therapeutic sensations and their physical patterns "visible". This is achieved with the very simple and inexpensive method of digital sensation drawing. In this further development of the classic pain drawing , the patient or practitioner can use a tablet PC to make a digital drawing of their sensations on a body outline . These can then be compared and even statistically analyzed.
In the above figure we see examples of such drawings (blue pictures), as they were made by patients who were using systemic autoregulation therapy were treated. Although these five patients have never seen each other and drawn independently on different days, their drawings and thus their feelings are remarkably similar. On the right edge (red picture) the course of the "Hand Tai Yang" pathway running in this area is shown, which is also known as the "small intestine pathway". Its zigzag course results from the historical fact that the concepts of channels and acupuncture points developed independently of one another and it was only later demanded that both should be part of a common concept. If you are interested in the original course without zigzag, you will find it here .
At the Insula Institute we investigate the theory that line-shaped therapeutic sensations are central to understanding the concept of the pathway in Chinese medicine. Similar concepts can be found in ancient Indian medicine in the form of the so-called nadis (Sanskrit: नाडि, nadi).
Research into therapeutic sensations is still at the very beginning. You can download an overview article by the author on the topic here . One of the most important unanswered questions that we want to answer at the Insula Institute is, among other things, what significance therapeutic sensations have for therapeutic success; whether it is really a universal phenomenon that occurs in a similar form across all mind-body therapies; why some systems, like Chinese medicine, attach great importance to therapeutic sensations, while others, like yoga, pay little attention to them; or which regions of our nervous system are responsible for their development.
Literature:
F. Beissner, “Therapeutic Sensations: A New Unifying Concept,“ Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Volume 2020, Article ID 7630190, 15 pages. Link .
V. Griffiths and B. Taylor, “Informing nurses of the lived experience of acupuncture treatment: a phenomenological account,” Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 111-120, 2005. Link .
CE Kerr, JR Shaw, LA Conboy, JM Kelley, E. Jacobson, and TJ Kaptchuk, “Placebo acupuncture as a form of ritual touch healing: a neurophenomenological model,” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 784-791, 2011. Link .
S. Possani Medeiros, AC Calçada de Oliveira, D. Roggia Piexak, L. Lemos Silva, AM Netto de Oliveira, andN. Cerutti Fornari, “Perception of nursing undergraduate student about receiving the therapeutic touch,” Revista de Pesquisa: Cuidado e Fundamental, vol. 11, no. 2, 2019. Link .
B. Raingruber and C. Robinson, “The effectiveness of Tai Chi, yoga, meditation, and Reiki healing sessions in promoting health and enhancing problem solving abilities of registered nurses,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 1141-1155, 2007. Link .
M. Smolka, “Translating between Buddhism and neuroscience: conceptual differences and similarities in epistemic cultures. Neuroscientific research on Vipassana meditation - a case study, ”The Self-Journal of Science, p. 647, 2017. Link .
A. Soundy, RT Lee, T. Kingstone, S. Singh, PR Shah, and L. Roberts, “Experiences of healing therapy in patients with irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease,” BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015. Link .