THERAPEUTIC TOUCH & SURGICAL PATIENTS STRESS REACTIONS

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The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of Therapeutic Touch in decreasing selected stress-related reactions in patients who undergo major elective surgery, and thereby, in facilitating patients' recovery from surgery. Specifically, this project is designed to test the hypotheses that Therapeutic Touch will decrease preoperative anxiety; decrease postoperative tension- anxiety, fatigue, pain, and need for analgesic medication; and increase postoperative vigor, and feeling of readiness for discharge on the day of discharge. The design is for a comparative clinical trial employing equivalent experimental and control groups, and repeated treatments and measures over the perioperative period. A sample of 156 male and female patients scheduled to undergo major elective abdominal or pelvic surgery will be recruited as subjects. A randomized blocking procedure will be used to assign subjects to one of three treatment groups: an experimental group receiving Therapeutic Touch, a single-blind control group receiving Mimic Therapeutic Touch, or standard control group receiving standard nursing care and no study treatments. Subjects will receive the assigned study treatment the evening before surgery and seven times during the postoperative period. Anxiety will be measured before and after treatment on the evening before surgery by the STAI-Y1 State Anxiety Questionnaire. pain will be measured before and at four intervals following one treatment administered in conjunction with a p.r.n. analgesic on the first postoperative day using a Visual Analogue Scale, and the time lapse until receiving the next analgesic, calculated. The amount and number of doses of analgesic medication received over the postoperative period will be calculated. Tension-anxiety, fatigue, and vigor will be measured on the evening before surgery and during the morning and evening of the first three postoperative days by the shortened form of the Profile of Mood States. Feeling of readiness for discharge will be measured on the day of discharge using a Visual Analogue Scale. The hypotheses will be tested using factorial analysis of variance, analysis of covariance, and repeated measures analysis of covariance techniques.