Not every fractured tibia causes the same amount of pain.
Triage nurses and surgeons at R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma in Baltimore have enlisted the aid of reiki (the manipulation of a body?s energy fields), music therapy and acupuncture in addition to traditional pain-control medication available to patients.
“At first the physicians were skeptical and wanted to know if I was going to bring in a voodoo doctor next,” said reiki practitioner and nurse Donna Audia. “I said, ?Not this week, but maybe next week if it?s going to help a patient.? ”
Now, 14 months later, she said doctors regularly recommend patients they think will benefit from reiki or acupuncture, and surgeons will stop her in the hall and ask for her help.
“When an illness or injury affects the physical body, it also affects us emotionally and spiritually,” Audia said. “I try to clear their mind and we just focus on the fact that the patient is going to heal.”
These therapies are gaining recognition as the University of Maryland?s Center for Integrative Medicine looks for ways to expand traditional medicine to meet the needs of more and more patients.
“We have always offered what we thought was state-of-the-art pain management techniques,” said anesthesiologist Dr. David Tarantino, director of the pain services at Cowley. “We know there is an emotional and behavioral component to pain. Pain is so complex and travels on so many different pathways. There?s no one-size-fits-all approach to manage pain.”
Traditional medicine also has more unpleasant side-effects, said Dr. Brian Berman, director of the Center for Integrative Medicine. R. Adams Cowley is the first shock trauma center in the country to begin offering these relaxation and energy therapies.
“It?s really about offering people more choices and more options that are evidence-based,” Berman said.
Staff at shock trauma and the center are preparing a study to put the effects of acupuncture on patients? pain scores.
“Shock trauma patients who have received acupuncture as part of their pain management have reported significant drops in their pain scores; now we want to see if we can quantify the percentage of that change,” Dr. Lixing Lao, a licensed acupuncturist with the Center for Integrative Medicine, said in a statement. “We will also investigate the impact of acupuncture on chemicals in the blood that are markers for pain.”
