Exploratory study of the association between Healing Scale and symptoms among terminally ill cancer patients.

Abstract

The Healing Scale was developed to measure subjects' sense of healing. This study aimed to investigate the association between the Healing Scale scores and symptom improvement in terminally ill cancer patients. A sub-analysis of a previous sound-based intervention study was performed. Data from 18 terminally ill cancer patients were analyzed. The Healing Scale and symptoms were measured before and 30 minutes after the intervention. Correlations between the Healing Scale score and symptoms before intervention, and improvement of the Healing Scale and symptoms were analyzed using Pearson's rho. The mean age of subjects was 69.4 years and 33.3% were female. At baseline, higher Healing Scale Scores were significantly correlated with greater symptom burden, particularly well-being (ρ=-0.57), shortness of breath (ρ=-0.55), and lack of appetite (ρ=-0.50). At post-intervention, improvements in the Healing Scale scores showed moderate to strong correlations with reductions in shortness of breath (ρ=-0.68), tiredness (ρ=-0.58), and well-being (ρ=-0.56). These findings suggest that the Healing Scale may be a valuable outcome measure in palliative care research and clinical practice and may help to evaluate subjective aspects of patient healing and well-being that are often overlooked by traditional symptom scales. Further studies with larger sample sizes are required to validate the present findings in palliative care settings.