What the Paper Settled, and What It Did Not

The results were written up with three co-authors and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998. Emily Rosa had run the first version as a school science fair project at the age of nine and was eleven when the paper appeared, which made her the youngest person to have authored a paper in that journal and generated most of the coverage. The journal editor defended the decision to publish on the ground that the study was sound and the subject was of practical importance given how widely the technique was being taught in nursing schools.

Criticism followed, and the substantive parts of it are worth recording. The number of trials per practitioner was small; the practitioners were recruited locally and some knew the tester; and no clinical outcome was measured, so the study says nothing directly about whether patients treated this way improve. The answer given by the authors is that the practice is justified by the detection claim, so refuting the detection claim removes the justification even if the outcomes were never examined. Therapeutic touch continued to be taught after publication. The atlas records the study as a clean example of testing the specific claim rather than the general practice, which is the part that transfers to other cases.