Emily Rosa

Therapeutic touch, as taught to nurses since the 1970s, holds that a human energy field extends beyond the skin, that a trained practitioner can feel it with the hands, and that smoothing or rebalancing it assists healing. The first of those claims is the one everything else rests on, and it is testable without any reference to whether patients get better, because it says the practitioner can tell where a person is.

The design was accordingly simple. The practitioner sat with her hands through two openings in a screen, palms up, unable to see across it. The tester placed one hand a short distance above one of the practitioner hands, choosing left or right by a coin flip, and the practitioner said which hand she felt. Twenty one practitioners were tested over a series of trials, and the proportion of correct answers was close to what guessing would produce. The strength of the arrangement is that it tests exactly what the practitioners said they could do, under conditions they agreed to in advance, and it makes no assumptions about mechanism. Whatever the field is supposed to be, the practitioners could not locate a hand through a screen.

One further feature of the design is worth noticing. Nothing in it required the tester to know anything about the practice, to hold a view about it, or to do anything that could influence the answer beyond flipping a coin and keeping still, which is why a child could run it. Tests of perception claims often fail on exactly that point, because the person administering them knows the answer and can leak it without meaning to. A screen and a coin remove both problems at once.

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.