Developing Healing Relationships: Foreword from the Organizers

Abstract

S-1 This 3rd American Samueli Symposium entitled “Developing Healing Relationships” was held on April 21–22, 2005, in Alexandria, Virginia. The symposium was designed to complement the two previous American Samueli Symposia, both of which explored the subject of optimal healing environments. The 1st symposium, “Definitions and Standards in Healing Research,” was held in January 2003. The content of that meeting focused on the variety of frameworks in which healing occurs and on approaches to the investigation of the internal environment of the patient and practitioner. The papers from this symposium were published as a supplement to the peer-reviewed journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine in May 2003. The 25 papers of the 2nd symposium, “Toward Optimal Healing Environments in Health Care,” were published as a supplement to the peer-reviewed Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in October 2004. This meeting explored the core domains of an Optimal Healing Environment (OHE) and provided recommendations for performing research in the inpatient, outpatient, and worksite venues. These papers are accessible on the Samueli Institute website, www.siib.org. The primary mission of the Samueli Institute is to support clinical and basic research in the science of healing. A primary goal of this research is to examine how relationships in health care either do or do not facilitate healing and self-recovery processes and to identify methods to extend that information to clinical and treatment settings. Accordingly, we fund collaborative research efforts that are oriented to the development, implementation, and evaluation of optimal healing environments and the relationship to these environments to the health care team members, the patients they serve, the patients’ significant others, and the community. To further define our research agenda, we invited colleagues who have been thoughtful contributors to this field to prepare papers related to OHE. As a result of their efforts, we have created the graphic on the back cover of this supplement. It highlights individual elements that combine to define an optimal healing environment. The graphic illustrates what we feel are the core domains of an optimal healing environment. They involve activities that do the following: