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Outside, the wild energy of a late-summer storm surges through the city. Long forks of lightning illuminate the various buildings that make up St. Louis' Barnes-Jewish Hospital complex;

thunder crashes in the darkened sky. Inside, 51 women are gathered for a crash course in energy of a different, much quieter kind.Classically trained nurses - many of whom spend their time

in high-tech intensive care units or dealing with coronary or oncology patients - along with hospice personnel, physical therapists, hospital chaplains, massage therapists, even a

professional modern dancer - are trying to learn how to harness the body's electromagnetic fields. Their goal: to heal, or at least ease, pain, both physical and psychological. Arranged

in a semicircle by healing touch instructor Vicki Slater, an RN who holds a doctorate in physics, they take turns playing therapist and client. Silently, therapists practice

"centering" their thoughts, then pass their hands close to (2 to 4 inches away, but not touching) their clients' heads, necks, shoulders and arms, making gentle, circular

motions in the air, trying to sense the "auras," or energy fields, emitted by clients. Next, clients are instructed to concentrate on an emotion-like grief or joy while therapists

try to assess the feeling. Later, there will be discussions on what, if anything, was discerned - heat, cool spots, pins-and-needles sensations and the like. It's the first step in a

workshop, sponsored by BJC Health System, on an unorthodox technique that claims to give relief by redirecting the flow of energy around a patient, "unruffling" congested areas to

smooth, or rebalance, the body's aura. Like other "New Age" therapies - among them acupressure, acupuncture, aromatherapy, homeopathy, massage, medicinal herbs - healing touch

has its detractors as well as its devotees. Dr. William Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, regularly decries such holistic approaches to healing as quackery.

But the more that conventional medicine fails to help patients with chronic pain or inoperable conditions, the more allopathic physicians - those with traditional medical school backgrounds

- are willing to at least consider other routes to wellness. Indeed, the National Institutes of Health recently opened an office to study alternative medicine. And educational institutions

as highly regarded as Harvard University Medical School are offering courses to familiarize students with such methods, which are as yet unscientifically proven. Dr. David Mutch, director of

the division of gynecologic oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, professes to have the kind of open-mindedness many physicians favor about combining

complementary medicine with conventional treatment. "My job is to recommend the best standard treatment for my patients. I would not suggest this (healing touch) as primary

therapy," Mutch says. "But there are many things about the human body we just don't understand. If these things do not cause harm, do not cost much and in fact do make some

patients more comfortable, who am I to tell people not to try them?" Mutch refers patients to Joanne Guerrerio, a pyschological resource nurse at BJC who uses healing touch, along with

interventions such as guided imagery and relaxation response, to help oncology patients in pain relief. Guerrerio organized the workshop with Slater after she attended a conference of the

American Holistic Nurses here in June. "I've been looking at complementary therapies for a long time because, as a patient, I've had lots of side effects with allopathic

medicine," says Guerrerio. "After I attended a nursing conference a few years ago and heard about touch therapy, I realized I had been sensing things with people for years in my

career. I didn't think I was a talented healer ... I just wanted to learn more about energy work." But touch therapy was anything but a natural progression for Slater, one of her

teachers. "I was tricked into this by the universe," Slater says with a laugh. As a member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve, Slater, a 28-year nursing veteran, was required to attend

continuing education courses. In 1989 she chose one in Memphis, based simply on logistics. It happened to be on healing touch. "When I got to the seminar, people were speaking a

language I'd never heard. I was certain I'd entered a den of loonies. I was so threatened that my back went into spasms," she says. That's when the instructor decided to

use Slater for a demonstration. "My pain disappeared. I decided I was either delusional or there was something to this - and it had nothing to do with the biology, chemistry or

physiology I had learned," Slater says. That's when she decided to get a Ph.D. in physics. She's been studying energy work ever since with theoretical physicist H.W. Crater of

the Institute of Space Sciences at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. It's well documented, Slater says, that humans as well as animals have electromagnetic fields. That is,

after all, how various species, like sharks, stalk their prey - by using electroreceptors to detect vibrations emitted by other organisms. It's the same reason that high-tech procedures

like magnetic resonance imaging are feasible. But the other major underpinning of energy theory - viewing the mind, body and soul as interconnected rather than as separate entities - is an

idea embraced by ancient healers from Greece to India, China and Native American cultures. And while many of the curative claims about therapeutic touch are simply anecdotal, Slater says

nearly 250 research studies have proven that it does indeed help with relaxation, pain relief, reduction of stress, increased rate of wound healing and enhanced immune status. Valerie

Yancey, an ICU nurse at Barnes-Jewish and faculty member of the Barnes College of Nursing at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, attended Slater's seminar. She says, "Nurses

have known the power of transpersonal relationships in healing for years. This gives us a way to legitimize that knowledge and perhaps appropriate some helpful, non-invasive techniques

without being bullied by those that would marginalize it." Yancey sees the growing popularity of all types of complementary medicine as part of a larger shift in American culture toward

personal responsibility for physical as well as spiritual well-being. "People generally seek new alternatives when older methods have lost their sway. As a nurse, I know the ICU - the

ventilators, IVs, shots, pills - challenged me to rethink how nurses should expend their energy." Still, Yancey is cautious both of those who totally embrace or completely reject the

new approaches. "To tell someone that you're going to cure their cancer by waving your arms around them - that's fraud. We have to be careful not to bottle and package this

knowledge like snake oil salesmen," she says. "At the same time, to dismiss it because it has not been rigorously tested and proven is wrong, too. ... We hear about placebo effects

all the time, and yet we know that placebos have a physiological effect because they induce the body to release endorphins. "We may not be tricking the body with the mind; we may

simply be putting the body and mind into the best state to heal." (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service)