Intuition’s Role in Health and Healing

It’s always with excitement that I wake up in the
morning wondering what my intuitor will toss up
to me like gifts from the sea.
                                            –  Jonas Salk, M. D.

Intuition, a capacity associated with expanded wisdom, knowledge, and creativity, has been traditionally associated with innovation, art, and science.  However, with the exception of Dr. Jonas Salk, intuition is rarely identified as a helpmate for health care professionals and/or people monitoring their own health needs.

Yet, the health care setting with its potential for highly emotional exchanges about healing, life enhancing issues, or death is a natural environment for intuition.  This is true for two reasons:  (1) intuition’s central activity is communication and (2) psi research suggests that intuition’s presence and accuracy is enhanced when emotional connections are heightened. Rhine Reference see below.

The nursing profession has conducted more intuition research than any other profession with the exception of parapsychologists or psi researchers. Why is this?  One possible answer is:  nurses share intuitive communication with their patients.  As nursing research demonstrates, it is often hard for nurses to talk to their superiors or other nurses about their experiences, but that doesn’t stop them from responding openly when they have a chance to acknowledge the topic.  There are many unanswered questions about what nurses have intuitive experiences, which environments increase the likelihood of a nurse acting on her intuition, and how to track intuition’s accuracy. Three leading nurse researchers discussed their work at a recent Symposium on the topic. Rew, Ruth-Sahd, Smith References see below , see below, and for more about their research: Nurses Research Intuition in Healthcare.  

Physicians are also starting to publish journal articles about intuition’s role in clinical settings. Tracy, Dantas, Upsher Reference, see below. Alternative and Complementary professionals often feel greater latitude in reporting these experiences and, in some cases, their modality integrates the use of intuition such as Rosen professionals sensing into the body, Indigenous healers ‘dialoguing’ inwardly with herbs to identify which is most applicable, or a massage therapist knowing exactly where a sore point is without the client saying anything.

Quiet Revolution in Health Care: Taking Charge
Although a complete health care revolution still remains in the wings, ordinary people are quietly creating their own revolution—they are beginning to take much more responsibility for their own health and wellbeing.  As conventional methods struggle with providing solutions for seriously or chronically ill people, more individuals are turning to the internet for information and often arrive at health care professionals’ offices armed with questions and sometimes even more recent knowledge than the health care professional has.  In addition to those facing more challenging health issues, research is consistently revealing how people’s health suffers with undue stress.  Many people are also investigating on their own how to reduce stress in their daily lives.   In short, the public is beginning to ‘take charge’ of their own health care by seeking health enhancing programs and options

Intuition is part of this ‘taking charge’ responsibility. People can train themselves to listen carefully to the messages and needs of their own bodies.  For example, news reports, magazine articles, and TV commentators continue to let us know that too much stress is a major factor in creating poorer health. Try slowing down long enough to ask yourself:

• Am I ignoring or overlooking subtle or not very subtle symptoms of stress? If so, can I begin to ask my body to help me identify ways of reducing stress?
• Do I talk to my body on a regular basis?
• When I am getting ready to eat, do I stop to ask myself if the food is good ‘fuel’ for my body?  How will it make me feel in a few hours?
• Am I getting enough rest and relaxation to restore my body?
• Do I thank my body for all that it does for me?

When these simple questions are made part of your daily, weekly, or monthly routine, you establish an inner, intuitive conversation line with your body. You can think of it as a phone line or email:  when your body is calling or emailing you about its condition, do you pick up the phone or answer the email?  If not, how long do you let your phone ring or delete your body’s email?  How many times and ways does your body have to alert you for you to respond?

In today’s fast paced world where many people face pressure at work, are snarled in traffic getting there, and eat nutritionally poor foods, it becomes more important to slow down and take time to check how the condition of your body.

When you slow down, you may not only have access to the status of your own body, but also potentially the body of your loved ones.

It is commonly recognized that sometimes parents spot potential health problems in their children before there are obvious symptoms. An example is a mother who thought her son’s health wasn’t right.  She took her child to several physicians and was repeatedly told there was nothing wrong.  Within the year, however, her child was diagnosed with childhood leukemia, which was treatable.  Although she had to wait for medical tests to ‘catch up’ to her intuition’s guidance, the mother remained true to her inner knowing.  Her actions simultaneously taught her child, her family, and people acquainted with the story the importance of paying attention to health care intuitions as well as continually checking their validity with professionals.  In this case, her persistence in seeking the truth was rewarded with her child’s diagnosis and treatment.

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People often ask, “Should I respond every time intuition seems to be telling me that something is wrong?”  The answer to this question is:  use your common sense. Intuition is part of common sense, not outside of it.  If your impressions are strong and/or persist, you have everything to gain by seeking the advice of an expert health care professional. 

If you learn that your impressions are incorrect, you can relax.  If you learn that you are facing a health challenge, you are equipped to begin handling it and recognize how your body cares for you.  If, after seeking input from an expert you remain uncertain or your intuition persists, get an opinion from another health care expert.  It is wise to confirm health care opinions whether or not you are motivated to get them by intuition or symptoms.

Institute of Health and Healing:
Abbott Northwestern Hospital

Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis opened its Institute for Health and Healing in 2004 with a new model that includes care teams composed of a nurse clinician, a massage therapist, and an acupuncturist. These care teams are available for consultation based on requests from the hospital’s healthcare professionals or the patients themselves.

Because of the positive research on the role of intuition in nursing, the teams received intuition training and today intuition is integrated into their daily activities. Team members meet every morning to set their intention to heal and help those they are scheduled to visit that day. They begin their day with this morning affirmation:

In addition, members of the team are encouraged to use their intuition to assess: What is needed, beyond what is required, by our patients today? By the healthcare professionals we will interact with? By family members we encounter? By the staff that serves our patients? And, by patients not on the list who we feel intuitively called to visit?

This openness to intuition allows the teams to act collaboratively on an intuitive level. They seek to be “in the zone,” knowing what to do and when to do it. The results are impressive. In 2004, when in-hospital care teams began their work, they received about 200 referrals from physicians and patients a month and in 2006, the referral number has soared to 1300 patient visits a month.

Lori Knutson, who directed the Institute of Health and Healing for many years, presented information about the use of intuition at Abbott Northwestern Hospital at the 2007 Ways of Knowing Symposium. For a summary of her presentations:  Link to Symposium Presentation

Getting More Information
In summary, intuition is an aspect of the modern health care experience. Health care providers and those who consult them for health care needs can receive intuitive information that is then checked for its validity. 
The University of Minnesota’s Center of Spirituality & Healing and the Life Science Foundation created a symposium in May 2007, Ways of Knowing:  Intuition’s Role in Health and Healing, which addressed many of the issues in this article.  For more info:  Link to Symposium Proceedings

In addition, the Taking Charge website, contains an entire section on Intuition and Health Care. For More Info: http://takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/therapies/intuition/what

References
Rew, Lynn, (2007)  Acknowledging Intuition in Clinical Decision Making. Journal of Holistic Nursing. 18; 94.

Rhine, Louisa, Hidden Channels of the Mind, New York, William Morrow and Company, 1961

Ruth-Sahd, Lisa, ‘See Everything, Hear What Is Not Being Said”:  A Phenomenological Investigation of Intuition in Novice Registered Nursing Practice,” (Dissertation 2004)

Smith, Anita (2006).  Continued psychometric evaluation of an intuition instrument for nursing students.  Journal of Holistic Nursing.  24 (2), 82-89

Tracy, S., Dantas, G., Upshur, R. (2003). Evidence-based medicine in primary care: qualitative study of family physicians. BMC Family Practice, 4:6, www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2296/4/6.

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