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A close look at therapeutic touch

L Rosa1, E Rosa, L Sarner

  • 1Questionable Nurse Practices Task Force, National Council Against Health Fraud Inc, Loveland, Colo, USA.

JAMA
|April 9, 1998
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Therapeutic Touch (TT) practitioners could not detect the investigator's "energy field" in a blinded study. Their inability to perceive this field suggests TT's claims lack scientific evidence.

Area of Science:

  • Nursing
  • Complementary and Alternative Medicine
  • Parapsychology

Background:

  • Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a nursing practice claimed to manipulate a human energy field.
  • Despite claims of a scientific basis, TT is rooted in mysticism.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To scientifically investigate if TT practitioners can perceive a human energy field.
  • To validate or refute the fundamental claims of Therapeutic Touch.

Main Methods:

  • Twenty-one experienced TT practitioners participated in blinded trials.
  • Practitioners attempted to identify the location of an investigator's hand near theirs.
  • Hand placement was randomized, and performance was compared against chance expectation.

Main Results:

Related Experiment Videos

  • TT practitioners correctly identified the hand location in 44% of trials, statistically similar to chance (50%).
  • No correlation was found between practitioner experience and accuracy.
  • The study possessed sufficient statistical power to detect a real effect if one existed.

Conclusions:

  • Experienced TT practitioners failed to detect the purported human energy field.
  • This empirical failure provides strong evidence against the scientific validity of TT claims.
  • The findings suggest TT's continued professional use is unjustified based on current evidence.