THE EDEN ENERGY MEDICINE
ETHICS HANDBOOK
A Guide for the Professional Practice of Energy Healing
David Feinstein, Ph.D.
and
Donna Eden
INTENDED AUDIENCE
While this Handbook was written specifically for Eden Energy Medicine practitioners, other health care professionals—both those just beginning to incorporate energy methods into their work and those fully trained in other energy healing modalities—have also found it to be of substantial value.
© 2008 INNERSOURCE
777 East Main Street
Ashland, OR 97520
October 2008
www.LearnEnergyMedicine.com
Acknowledgments
A document of this nature builds upon the tall shoulders of innumerable health care practitioners and those they have tended through history. Ethical guidelines are a profession’s evolving legacy for serving the public at the highest standard possible.
Ethics statements used by the Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Alliance, the American Holistic Nurses Association, the American Psychological Association (APA), the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP), the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, the Council of Healing, the Energy Kinesiology Association, the Somatic Therapist Association, and the Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork Board were all consulted and had influence in the development of this document. The thought each profession has devoted to these issues is gratefully acknowledged.
Initial ideas on how to approach the fifty ethical vignettes that comprise much of this Handbook were formulated by a team of senior Eden Energy Medicine practitioners chaired by Debra Hurt Burchard. Members of the team included:
Francie Boyce
Helen Campbell
Marjorie Fein
Ellen Ferguson
Jan Firstenberg
Sue Gridley
Debra Hurt Burchard, Chair
Donna Kemper
Tammy Komp
Sue Powell
June Scott
Janel Volk-Hubbard
We are indebted to these individuals for their strong contributions to the following discussions.
Final proofing and editorial suggestions were skillfully provided by Ellen Meredith and Connie Kosmann. Production was managed in the good hands of Jennifer Massey.
THE EDEN ENERGY MEDICINE ETHICS HANDBOOK
A Guide for the Professional Practice of Energy Healing
October 2008[1]
Contents
Ethics in Energy Medicine: Introduction
Case Vignettes:
Overview
Fifty Case Vignettes Involving Ethical Dilemmas
Discussion of the Fifty Case Vignettes
The EEM Ethics Code
EEM Ethical Standards
A. General Principles
B. Personal Healing and Development
C. Competence and Scope of Practice
D. Informed Consent
E. The Healing Relationship
F. Confidentiality
G. Personal and Interpersonal Boundaries
H. Record Keeping
I. Public Statements and Advertising
J. Teaching and Presentations
K. The Resolution of Ethical Issues
Six Steps for Thinking through an Ethical Dilemma
Ethical Guidelines in a Nutshell
References
ETHICS IN ENERGY MEDICNE
Introduction
Ethics in health care are the principles adopted by practitioners within a particular discipline to translate the desire to serve into the profession’s evolving wisdom about how best to serve. Far more than a list of rules, ethics guide members of a profession on the lessons gleaned from the experience of those who came before them about: 1) how to create and maintain the most vital context possible for providing healing services; and 2) how best to navigate through the various kinds of challenges likely to arise when providing those services. By embracing the need to address the issue of ethics, a practitioner is also recognizing that offering health care services to the public is a public trust.
Because of the innovative nature of energy healing and the sensitivities involved in working with subtle energies, energy practitioners face ethical challenges that not only include but also go beyond the concerns of more traditional healing modalities. Representing oneself as an Eden Energy Medicine (EEM) practitioner is based on having attained specified credentials and also constitutes a commitment to comply with the EEM Ethics Code and Standards and to the procedures used by the EEM Ethics Committee for insuring adherence to them.[2]
The EEM Ethics Code is a brief statement of general principles designed to guide practitioners toward the highest aspirations of their profession. The Handbook provides specific direction for translating them into the complexities of an EEM practice. It includes this Introduction, fifty case vignettes and discussion of their resolution, the Ethics Code, ethical Standards that offer more detailed guidelines than the Code, and a six-step model for thinking through an ethical dilemma.
It should be noted that while strictly following every item in the Code and the Standards is a good faith way of supporting ethical practice, in the complexities of everyday professional activities, many practitioners do not rigorously follow every principle and guideline. Nor are they meant to be strict rules that are rigidly applied. However, if an ethical problem arises, the burden of proof is on the practitioner that the actions taken were informed and in good conscience.
The Code is a public statement, posted at www.EnergyMedicineEthics.com, which lists the principles toward which Certified EEM practitioners have agreed to aspire. The remainder of the Handbook provides practitioners with practical guidelines for putting the Code into practice. It includes principles, elaborations of the Code into detailed Standards, and case discussions. It is understood to be an evolving document, with periodic updates (overseen by the EEM Ethics Committee) based upon the collective experiences of the EEM community. EEM practitioners are invited to propose changes, are informed of updates, and are expected to stay current with these updates. A list of updates since the October 2008 publication of this written version of the Handbook is maintained at EnergyMedicineEthics.com.
FIFTY ETHICAL DILEMMAS -- OVERVIEW
When you open your practice to the public, you have little control over who will call or walk through the door. The vast, vast majority of the people you encounter will present situations you are well-equipped to handle or to refer without incident. The fifty case vignettes that comprise the largest part of the EEM Ethics Handbook illustrate the kinds of dilemmas that can, however, potentially occur.
Rather than begin with the formal EEM Ethics Code or Standards, we would like to first get you thinking about and feeling into ethical dilemmas you might plausibly face in your own practice. The fifty case vignettes present eye-crossing situations that call for decisions that may be difficult to reach or implement. In fact, for many of them, no “perfect” solution exists. Instead, competing ethical principles may be at play, such as when the need to maintain confidentiality competes with the duty to warn of a physical threat. A first step in thinking through such a dilemma is to clearly identify the competing principles that are involved. The EEM Ethics Code, and the more detailed Standards, constitute a list of principles and guidelines that may be applicable. Selections from these lists that open the discussion of each vignette are also a way of introducing you to the numerous points of information found in the Code and Standards in bite-sized quantities.
Following the fifty vignettes are discussions which repeat the vignette, identify the principles and guidelines that might apply, and think through how to come to the best, or at least a reasonable solution, given the situation. Contemplating on the 50 vignettes and reading the discussions about each is designed to give you a visceral as well as intellectual sense of the dilemmas involved. Our intention is that by immersing yourself and your imagination in these fifty human dilemmas and their resolution, you will gain in a distilled form a deeper sense of professional ethics than some health care providers develop after 20 years of practice. At the end of the Handbook is a 6-Step Model which summarizes the thinking represented in the discussion of the vignettes. The vignettes can also be used in an EEM study group which discusses a vignette and how to handle it before reading the resolution offered below.
The purpose of the case vignettes is to prepare, not to scare. In the course of an entire career, you might personally come across only a handful of these kinds of ethical dilemmas. But you don’t know in advance which ones you will come up against. So thinking through a broad range of dilemmas both helps prepare you for whatever you might face and also informs you of advance steps that will head off avoidable conflicts.
Unlike the EEM Ethics Code and Standards, the discussions of the ethical dilemmas do not constitute official EEM policy. They are, rather, presented to model a way of thinking about ethical dilemmas and to stimulate further deliberation.
FIFTY CASE VIGNETTES INVOLVING ETHICAL DILEMMAS
1. One of your closest friends is diagnosed with cancer, and he is going the conventional route involving surgery/chemo/radiation. If it were you, you would start with a month of aggressive EM sessions several times per week supported by daily self-help EM techniques. How hard do you attempt to persuade him to try this approach?
2. Your friend from the dilemma above decides to postpone the surgery in order to try an energy medicine approach and gets the oncologist to agree to one month to see what happens. He insists, however, that you are the one who must do the sessions. While you have worked with this level of illness in the past, you have never worked with someone who is close to you with such a serious diagnosis and you are concerned that you may not be the best practitioner because your emotional involvement and desire to do a good job might get in the way of doing a good job and might get in the way of knowing when to suggest that more aggressive procedures may be necessary. What do you do?
3. Your closest friend within the energy medicine community, a relative newcomer, wants you to be her mentor. How does this impact the friendship? Should you do it at all?
4. You are working with a woman who has been having anxiety attacks during the past six months, and you are also working with her husband, for digestive problems. During a breakthrough session with the husband, you learn that he has been having a secret affair. It is immediately obvious to you that his wife’s anxiety is based on her picking this up at some level, though you have also been working with some success on ways her anxiety seems tied to her childhood history. Can you continue to work with her? Him? Could you have taken any steps to prevent this crisis in confidentiality?
5. You are teaching a one-evening EEM class. During the break, a man comes up to you and tells you he has been having EEM sessions with a practitioner you have not met. He feels the practitioner has made several mistakes in the way he has been treated, which he describes, and asks your opinion. What do you say?
6. You refer a male client to a chiropractor for some structural work. You have several insights about the relationship of his emotions, energies, and structural problems. You have shared some of these observations with him but have not felt he would be able to hear your thoughts about the role of his emotions in his physical problems. Can you share your speculations with the chiropractor?
7. You are working with a new client and you sense an energy in the second chakra that feels to you like the energy of cancer. What do you do?
8. You are extremely attracted to one of your clients, who you have met with three times and are continuing to see weekly. You find yourself looking forward to this client’s sessions and fantasizing about a personal relationship. What actions do you take in response to your feelings?
9. Your client is being treated by a physician who is prescribing medication that you believe is both unnecessary and an obstacle rather than an aid to recovery. What do you do?
10. A woman who has discovered a lump on her breast does not want to have a biopsy. She comes to you and asks you to use energy testing and intuition to determine if it is malignant. What do you do?
11. Your client’s physician wants her to stop seeing you because the physician believes that energy medicine is quackery and might even do his patient harm. Meanwhile, the patient has not been able to find scientific evidence that EEM is a legitimate treatment approach and is inclined to follow the physician’s advice. But you know your sessions with the client are just starting to have an impact and believe it would be detrimental to terminate them. What do you do?
12. You have just completed a difficult grid session and you learn that the client has a Rolfing session scheduled that afternoon. You are concerned that this will prevent the grid work from settling in. Can you ask a client to reschedule a session with another practitioner?
13. You are working your client’s neurolymphatic points. Your client is clearly in considerable discomfort. How do you determine if you are applying too much pressure? If you determine the pressure is therapeutic and right, do you ignore your client’s discomfort?
14. You are a female working with a male client’s neurolymphatic points and have come to the pubic bone. His penis is covering some of the points. What do you do?
15. A man who has heard of your ability to sense energies asks you to assess whether he needs a colonoscopy, a procedure that was routinely recommended because he has just turned 50. You have a very clear sense from sensing his energies, as well as from energy testing, that he does not. What do you do?
16. A man consults you after his wife is diagnosed with lung cancer. He had been a smoker for the 30 years of their marriage and she had complained about this for 30 years. He immediately gave up smoking after her diagnosis, and his guilt is enormous. The wife is only interested in a conventional medical approach. He wants to pursue every possible avenue to help her and has heard that energy healing can be done on a remote basis. You ask for her consent, but he begs you to “just do it” because she already has too much on her mind and introducing her to such a strange concept might overwhelm her. Can you do the healings for her without her explicit permission?
17. You have been developing your ability at remote viewing and surrogate healing. You have a session with a young man in a few hours and have been thinking about his case. Can you “tune into” him as you consider how you can best serve him?