A Conversation with Dr. Dolores Krieger
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits, not found in the book)

Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N. (www.therapeutictouch.org) is professor emerita of nursing at New York University and the author of five books on noninvasive healing, including the landmark work Therapeutic Touch: How to Use Your Hands to Help and to Heal. Following her pioneering studies into therapeutic touch in the 1970s, Dr. Krieger has gone on to teach her innovative methods to more than forty-two thousand health professionals and thousands more laypeople. Dolores recounts realizing thirty-five years ago that there were many more ways for nurses to help patients than conventional hospital care facilitated. “I was aware that we were pretty much a ‘no touch’ society. And what I began to realize was that just the humanness of one person touching or being close to another person was very helpful in terms of simple presence.

“I did not come upon the idea of therapeutic touch alone. It has been a collaboration with a colleague, Dora Kunz, all these years that really has made therapeutic touch what it is today. Dora had unusual abilities to see vital and very subtle energies. She did some work with religious healers and the ‘laying on of hands.’ After awhile, Dora began to realize that she understood how the healing was taking place. We came to feel it was not religion specifically that was facilitating the healing process. The religious orientation helped the participants, but the healing process was something that one could get at through means other than religious experience. That realization was the basis for our development of therapeutic touch, and we began to pursue the potential for it, and what conditions might help facilitate it. I decided to try applying Dora’s observations myself, and at one point a subject I was working on described what was happening to her in such detail that it became apparent that the process was working. And then literally nobody was safe! I worked on anybody and any condition, from headaches to chronic diseases, and I found that I was able to alleviate pain.”

Dolores reports that there has been widespread acceptance of therapeutic touch in the nursing communities and in many hospitals. “Just about every profession within the health field by now has been taught therapeutic touch. In fact, we have taught therapeutic touch in over ninety countries in the world, and in the U.S. and Canada in over sixty medical centers and health agencies. In some hospitals, there are separate facilities for therapeutic touch and in others the practitioner just uses therapeutic touch during the course of therapy. We can get a relaxation response two to four minutes into the treatment, which is pretty good. In a sense, it opens the patient. That response helps facilitate treatments and healing. We also have a lot of success in quickly and consistently easing pain. We train even dental hygienists, for instance. We work with premature babies and children. Therapeutic touch often precedes and follows surgery of all kinds. And we’re increasingly drawing the interest of doctors, anesthesiologists, and other medical professionals besides nurses. There was a group of touch therapists at St. Vincent’s hospital in New York during the 9/11 disaster, tending to patients and staff. For two solid weeks, the facility was constantly manned. Similar teams served in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

“Therapeutic touch has become increasingly popular in both the community and the home, as well. Most early adopters came out of nursing simply because I was myself a nurse. We taught only professionals until we were convinced of its safety, but since 1980 we have also been teaching lay people. Therapeutic touch turns out to be a natural, almost universal human potential. In all these years, I don’t think more than a dozen people have been unable to learn it. I can teach the basic elements in just three or four hours. But of course there’s also a great deal of depth to therapeutic touch. It can become a life’s work. In addition to being a mode of healing someone who is ill, it also launches an inner journey for the therapist. It opens us to ourselves and our potential.”

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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where millions of people already live and thrive. It describes in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first century full of insights, conversations with recognized experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal flip.

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