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and even graduate courses in the techniques. In-service and CEU-approved seminars
popped up from Albuquerque to Yakima. A few hospitals established ―departments of
energy‖ with TT at their hearts. The National League for Nursing, which accredits nursing
schools, produced and sold promotional videotapes on TT. The establishmentarian
American Nursing Association had TT workshops at its national conventions. The nascent
American Holistic Nursing Association, a motley crew devoted to eclecticism in nursing,
latched onto a schismatic form of TT which called itself ―Healing Touch.‖ The North
American Nursing Diagnosis Association included ―energy-field disturbances‖ as one of their
official diagnoses, with TT as the only recognized treatment thereof. A host of popular
imitators popped up with manual ―aura‖ readings, ―hands of light,‖ channelled angels, and
similar knock-offs. Even the ghost of Blavatsky‘s contemporary, Florence Nightingale, was
academically conjured to give her blessing to the ―caring‖ aspects of the enterprise. In all,
nurses got to think of themselves as ―healers,‖ on a par with physicians. TT was a winner.
There was just one little nagging fly in the soup: TT had no basis in reality. Nursing
academics, particularly the Rogerians, had only been playing at science. Their supporting
scientific research was sparse and specious. The theoretical underpinnings were
Theosophical double-talk, ignorant of the physical sciences it evoked, though facile in term-
dropping. And Nightingale, who was actually a hard-nosed empiricist, had been slandered
historical revisionists had looked past the reasons for her enduring fame—her commitment
to hygiene and germ theory—in a search for any pontifical sanction they could find.
No one seemed to mind the Drosophila—except for a few skeptics, who would take potshots
at TT from time to time—apparently it never seemed problematical or threatening. Then,
without warning, things changed in a single day. On April 1, 1998, the prestigious Journal
of the American Medical Association (JAMA) decided to weigh in. It published a review of
the scientific literature on TT by Linda Rosa, RN, and a report on an experiment by her
daughter, Emily. It started out as a fourth-grade science-fair experiment, with 9-year-old
Emily asking fifteen TT practitioners to demonstrate their abilities. They would rest their
hands, palms up, on a table, while Emily would hold one of her hands approximately four
inches (TT healing distance) over one of theirs (randomly chosen by a flip of a coin). Each
practitioner was asked to ―sense‖ which of their hands was closest to Emily‘s there was a
cardboard barrier placed between the subject and Emily so that the subject couldn‘t see her
hands or Emily‘s. Each subject got 10 tries. Just by guessing, the average subject should
get 5 right. These TTPs averaged 4.7. A year later, another 13 trials were run, and the
average that time was 4.1. Overall, they averaged 4.4, consistent with just guessing. The
odds were only 3 in 10,000 that the TTPs would have failed the test if they could actually
feel Emily‘s energy field at least three times out every four.
Emily‘s experiment showed that TT practitioners, when put to the test, couldn‘t tell the
difference between a real person and empty air. Linda‘s literature review showed that they
never had. In a parsimonious assessment with classical scientific understatement, they
together concluded, ―These facts…suggest that TT claims are groundless and that further
use of TT by health professionals is unjustified.‖
The power of the JAMA cachet is awesome. Literally millions of people heard about TT for
the first—and only—time, and simultaneously heard it was nonsense. Krieger and her
followers tried mightily to explain away their quarter-century failure to validate their
practice, but there was little to say when JAMA reports that your PhD has just been trumped
by a sixth grader. But they tried anyway. They attacked the statistics, but JAMA‘s
reviewers had done their work and the calculations held up. They attacked the sample size,
but the number of subjects exceeded the number found in most pro-TT clinical experiments.
They actually thought Emily‘s ―energy field‖ could have been throwing off the experiment‘s
subjects, by being variously too small, too large, too healthy, too sick, or—ahem—too
pubescent. They called the experimental protocol simplistic, a mere ―parlor trick,‖ but

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 18, 2001, Page 139
couldn‘t explain away its applicability to their claims for TT practice. They took aim at Emily
(and Linda) for being skeptically biased, but had to admit that all of their own experiments
were done by biased experimenters, too. They claimed JAMA broke its own rules in
publishing the work of an elementary-school student, but the scientific community agreed
with JAMA editor George Lundberg, who declared, ―Age is irrelevant it‘s the quality of the
science that matters.‖ Lundberg had gotten to the heart of the embarrassment for TT:
what Emily did was good science—of the sort that the proponents should have done
themselves right from the start back in the early 70s. Emily later concisely explained their
dilemma to a Harvard audience: ―Imagine, I was given my first big break fifteen years
before I was born!‖
Somebody had finally swatted the fly—and spattered the soup on the walls to boot. TT
never recovered. To be sure, there was a flurry of post-JAMA pro-TT publications, mostly in
nursing journals, but nothing scientifically challenged the Rosas‘ conclusion. Tellingly, all the
new papers were more of the same pre- JAMA—inadequate and expensive clinical outcome
studies in the succeeding three years, no TT proponent apparently dared a refutation-by-
attempted-replication of the experiment that took Emily less than 20 hours and ten dollars
to complete. TT is now fading into history, and Theosophy is out beating the bushes for
something else to revive its own fading fortunes.
Though it is no longer of contemporary importance, the colorful origins, atavistic philosophy,
and silly practices of TT, and especially the story of its slow rise and sudden fall in nursing
over the space of 35 years, could still make for a fascinating book. So why didn‘t
Therapeutic Touch, edited by Béla Scheiber and Carla Selby (Prometheus, 2000), try to be
that?
It is not clear what the putatively skeptical Committee for the Scientific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) had in mind when it published Therapeutic Touch. Was
it supposed to be a popular exposé, a scientific contribution to the literature, a skeptical
review, or a reference/source-book? It is certainly a failure, whichever of these, if any, was
intended.
Scheiber and Selby squander their opportunities with a puzzling mish-mash of 23 reprints
and original essays that gives no particular enlightment to the uninitiated on TT. Indeed,
someone who comes upon the book, without any prior knowledge of the subject,
doubtlessly comes away from it with a great deal of confusion about just what TT—and all
the hubbub—is about. The 31-page ―brief‖ history of TT manages simultaneously to outline
all of TT‘s precursors in plodding detail and yet misses all of the really interesting bits it‘s
uninformed, too—the part that details skeptics‘ activism is revisionist and written without
interviewing many of the real players. The only thing the editor‘s introduction describes is
the editors‘ own story of how they came to be introduced to the practice the foreword by
CSICOP‘s Ray Hyman is of more value, but that, too, is limited. There is no other editorial
assistance to help the reader through the book and its welter of reprints. There is not even
a cogent description of how TT is performed. As a consequence readers are left to float in a
gravity-less vacuum without any handholds. To make matters worse, the book‘s
organization is arbitrary and maze-like related pieces are scattered and have no rational
sequencing.
The book won‘t help the TT-initiated either: Its 360 pages add nothing at all significant to
the body of literature about TT and its skepticism is delusory. There is a report on the
―examination‖ of a single practitioner, which is worthless even as a case study the
―practitioner‖ did not even claim to do TT. There is another report, with parodic imitation of
the JAMA experiment, which claims to explain what TT practitioners really feel during their
practice, but without testing a single TT practioner (and totally missing the point of the
JAMA paper that TTers have never shown an ability to feel anything). In a surprising move,