Touching Experience

"To sift reality from fantasy, sense from nonsense, therefore requires a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, humbly open but not gullible," I say in Chapter 1. To accomplish this sifting, psychologists harness the analytical power of the controlled experiment. A lovely example of the analytical power of this comes from a fourth grade science fair project, conducted by then 9-year-old Emily Rosa, which was reported in the April 1, 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Emily proposed the experiment when she glanced at the TV while her mother, a skeptical nurse, was watching a videotape about the purported powers of therapeutic touch--a technique in which healers supposedly influence the "human energy field" by passing their hands over afflicted body regions. (Dolores Kreiger, a retired NYU nursing professor who pioneered therapeutic touch, claims to have trained more than 47,000 practitioners, who have gone on to train thousands more in 75 countries.)

Emily's idea: have healers rest their hands, palms up, on a flat surface. (Thanks to a screen, the healers wouldn't see their hands.) Then, after the toss of a coin, Emily would hover a hand over one of the practitioner's hands to see if the practitioner could indeed feel the "warmth" of the energy field in the therapeutically touched hand.

In 1996, James Randi offered $742,000 (now upped to $1.1 million) to anyone who could detect a human energy field under similar conditions. Randi's organization offers such rewards to anyone who can prove any kind of "supernatural" phenomenon. Only one person among the tens of thousands of believers was willing to be tested. After achieving chance results--11 out of 20--she declined an offer of further testing and left in a huff.

Apparently less threatened by a 9-year-old girl doing a science fair project, 21 practitioners agreed to be tested by Emily for ten trials each. They averaged 47 percent correct. A year later the trials were conducted again. This time each practitioner was allowed first to "feel" Emily's energy field in each hand and to choose which hand she would use for the testing. In this replication, the practitioners got only 41 percent correct.

Commenting on the study (lead-authored by Emily's mom, Linda Rosa), JAMA editor George Lundberg said "this simple, statistically valid study" shows that the supposed human energy field "does not exist" and that "patients should save their money and refuse to pay for this procedure until or unless additional honest experimentation demonstrates an actual effect."

For information on another failed effort to confirm therapeutic touch assumptions, check out the Spring 1998 issue of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. Another always helpful resource is The Journal of the American Medical Association, which you can visit at http://jama.ama-assn.org,