Healing Enhancement Program

Colleen Daly woke on Christmas Day 2006 aching from a rib-spreading, muscle-stretching heart transplant and the tension of her life-or-death ordeal.

"I hurt so bad — every bone in my body," says the 51-year-old wife and mother from Spirit Lake, Iowa. "I was scared to death, and I think I had every muscle in my body tensed up."

Then she received a massage. Stress and aches melted away. "It relaxed me so much," Daly says. "I actually got rest and got to sleep."

The Healing Enhancement Program provides massage, music and relaxation therapies to help reduce pain, tension and anxiety for patients undergoing heart surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The divisions of Cardiovascular Surgery and Complementary and Integrative Medicine developed the pilot program to meet patients' physical, psychological and spiritual needs. As a result, patients feel better physically and emotionally, sleep better, need less pain medication, and recover more quickly.

"This is the most multidisciplinary effort I've ever seen," says Thoralf Sundt, M.D., a cardiac surgeon on the committee that organized the Healing Enhancement Program. "We're trying to transform the patient's hospital experience. The Cardiac Intensive Care Unit doesn't have to be a scary place. We want to make it a healing environment."

Although medicine in the United States has been slow to adopt complementary therapies, the Healing Enhancement Program is helping to establish evidence-based practices through research, including a study on the effectiveness of acupuncture in treating nausea, a common problem after heart surgery.

Therapeutic massage remains a pilot program because it raises the cost of care but is not charged to the patient. Donations designated for the Mayo Clinic Healing Enhancement Program can help ensure this option for heart-surgery patients.

Rakesh Suri, M.D., D.Phil., lead surgeon on Daly's transplant, believes that complementary therapies speed healing and recovery by tapping into the patient's natural healing ability. Daly had no need for pain medication, experienced no issues with fluid buildup, and was discharged two days ahead of schedule.

"I blame it on the fantastic care," Daly says. "Things are going great."