Our emotional states are contagious. 
– Elizabeth Krueger, M.D.

   Kim, a nurse, has become a patient. She sits in an ER waiting room caught in the jaws of her acute abdominal pain. Her agony is worse than anything she has ever felt. Yet, she is ignored by clerks and other staff who tend to other matters. Along comes a patient being wheeled toward X-ray. Something remarkable happens. The woman pushing the gurney, a transporter, stops, comes over to Kim and touches her shoulder. "May I do anything to help you?" she asks. 
   "The moment she touched me," Kim told me years after this incident, "I immediately felt better – as if her hand was some kind of magic wand of curing. Someone had seen me. A caring person in a uniform cared about how I was feeling. The experience transformed me as a person and as a nurse."
   Fortunately, Kim is now a Chief Nursing Office. She is now in a position to influence the emotional states of hundreds of caregivers – to help them to unwrap their own healing gifts.
   Can a caring touch really awaken changes in physical health? Are emotional states truly "contagious" as Dr. Krueger says? And if they are, how does this impact caregiving?…

   What if we imagined that our feelings traveled through the air as some form of virus (either healing, illness-causing or neutral) or
as some form of electrical energys traveling through the air like light or darkness?
   We often use physics terminology to
describe our emotional states. We talk of the presence of
"negative" people and how they can depress our moods and how "positive" people can
raise our spirits. We speak of rest as a time to
"recharge our batteries." We ask for "feedback" from each other and described being "shocked" by a piece of news that floats through the air and into our ears. This is the  language of electrical energy. It suggest that we sense, intuitiviely, that some of our life force is a phenomenon of physics – that are our emotions travel through air to others with the power of light waves.
   Similarly, we use the language of physical states when we describe good work
environments as healthy and bad environments as "toxic" – as if bad
work environments transmitted illness like a flu virus (and perhaps they do.) Some of
the ways we discuss organizational morale suggest Dr. Krueger is
correct – that our emotional states are contagious and that team
dysfunction is transmitted as if it were a
virus-carrying mosquito loaded with Yellow Fever.

   When, in the 1830s, scientist Michael Faraday (the person who first liquefied chlorine, discovered the battery and produced the electric arc) first announced his theory that light traveled through the air as electro-magnetic waves he was ridiculed. It took twenty years of persistent work by many before his theory was accepted, thus laying part of the foundation for the work of Einstein and countless other scientists.
   Scientists once derided the idea that light travels at 670,000 miles
per hour. Now they know this as fact. Love’s energy also travels invisibly.
We don’t know her speed. But we have all felt her power and we know, in
our hearts, that we must engage this power in our caregiving because we
know that every patient, like every person, needs love.

   Perhaps it is time for us to apply the power of scientific method to analyzing the impact of our emotional attitudes on the health of others. In fact, this has already been done to a limited degree. For example, the Drs. Glaser at The Ohio State University have proved conclusively that stressed caregivers engaged in long term service to Alzheimer’s patients took substantially longer (nine days) to recover from surface wounds than did a control group not confronted with such stresses. The Placebo Effect (better described by some as The Meaning Effect) suggests strongly that there are many other curative forces than drugs and surgery. Long ago, scientific studies at university medical centers demonstrated the so called "white coat effect" which proved that the mere appearance of a doctor in a white coat raises the blood pressure and heart rate of some patients.
   I believe that science will one day demonstrate that we transmit our feelings through the air as waves of energy that affect people as powerfully as can electricity or a virus. At this moment in the future, the science-driven model of American medicine may finally raise the role of compassion and kindness to its proper place in the treatment paradigm – as an essential part of the caregiving plan.     Doctors, nurses, and all other caregivers, will, one day:

   1) be made aware that their mere arrival in the patient’s room can immediately affect the health of patients as does all of the other aspects of their presence.

   2) be retrained to think and act differently around patients – to jettison rude behavior as potentially illness-causing – to cultivate grace – to learn effective ways to express compassion as they deliver medical treatment.

   For decades the medical-industrial complex has largely discounted the idea that caregiver presence can be potentially healing or illness-causing. Science and business continue to crush the expression of compassion under the relentless steamroller of their power. Compassion is nice but insignificant, science alleges. Compassion is inefficient, business forces argue. 
   Recently, some business-oriented health care leaders have decided that "customer service" programs can advance success. Many hospitals have spent millions to improve their patient satisfaction scores. But most of these efforts miss the mark because caregiving is, fundamentally, not the same as selling used tires. Your mother and mine, if afflicted by cancer, don’t seek customer service from a nurse. They want loving care. Some of the business-oriented folks in health care have had trouble grasping this truth (unless, perhaps, the patient is their mother.)

   Perhaps the time for scientific study of the impact of caregiver attitudes has already arrived. Yes, some studies have already done. But the old model has a ferocious hold on medical protocols. Some medical students who do well in their traditional academic studies are handed medical degrees even if they would flunk any course that might measure their ability to deliver care with compassion.  It appears that only scientific proof that caregiver presence affects a patient’s health will change the protocols that control the medical model.
   If this is so, it’s time to intensify the study of the impact of caregiver energy on patients. In the meantime, those who truly believe in world class caregiving will stretch their treatment approaches to accomodate an emphasis on love in medical school and nursing school training. And the rest of us, if we seek to be excceptional caregivers, will need to nurture our faith in the enormous, ineffable, healing power of God’s love.

-Erie Chapman