The most cited scientific test of energy healing was designed and carried out by a child. In 1998, Emily Rosa, then eleven years old, published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association testing practitioners of Therapeutic Touch, the system developed within nursing by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz, on a simple claim central to the practice: that a trained practitioner could detect the presence of another person's energy field with their hand, without seeing it, through a screen that blocked vision of the person's hand but not of the practitioner's own. Twenty-one experienced practitioners were asked, across repeated trials, to say which of their own two hands, held beneath the screen, was closer to the investigator's hand on the other side, and their success rate came out at almost exactly the level chance alone would predict, well below what the practitioners themselves had expected to achieve, a result the paper's authors, including Rosa's mother and a physician, argued undermined the specific mechanistic claim the therapy rests on regardless of whatever benefit patients report from the sessions themselves.
The study became unusually prominent partly because of Rosa's age at the time of the work and partly because it targeted a testable, falsifiable claim rather than the harder to test general notion of a subtle energy, and it is still cited on both sides of the debate: by critics as decisive evidence against the field-detection premise of Therapeutic Touch specifically, and by practitioners and defenders who argue the test measured only one narrow claim and that the therapy's reported benefits, chiefly relaxation and reduced anxiety, do not depend on that particular ability being real.