Euthanasia

10 Pages 2415 Words

rk, Gauthier, and Williams conducted a study, which suggests that therapeutic touch can assist the nurse in controlling the level of pain and anxiety experienced by burn patients. Turner et al set out to study if therapeutic touch (TT) could produce a lower level of pain and a lower level of anxiety. The sample was made as representative as possible of the target population by setting limits on who was allowed to participate in the study. An eligible subject was one who was hospitalized for severe burns and was between the ages of fifteen and sixty-eight. The sample was also controlled for portion of the body area burned, disabilities, level of cognitive and psychiatric functioning, and length of hospital stay (Turner et al., 1998, 12-13).
Three specially trained nurses administered the TT treatments. The ninety-nine participants of the study were administered therapeutic touch treatments that ranged from five to twenty minutes in duration at their convenience on five different days. The sham group received treatments, but the nurse did not focus on helping the patient and made mimic TT type movements. After treatment each subject was asked to fill out questionnaires and use visual analog scales to assess their levels of pain, anxiety, and perceived effectiveness of treatment. The questionnaires are verbal and more qualitative in nature, but the analog scales were used to avoid language barriers (Turner et al., 1998, 12-15).
One significant flaw of this study is that the same practitioner didn’t administer everybody’s therapy. This can affect the outcome of the study because some practitioners might be better than others at TT. Another flaw is that the duration of TT treatment varied from 5-20 minutes. It seems like the perceptions of the subjects would be influenced by how much time the practitioner spent with them. Similar to a doctor visit, most people feel that they received good treatment when the doctor spent time...