Touch Therapy was successfully refuted by a 9 year old girl with just a cardboard and a towel. How's the story?
It all started in 1996, where a girl named Emily Rosa asked a 'touch therapy' practitioner to take a scientific test. Emily Rosa is the daughter of two skeptics and it was from her parents that she heard about the therapy. He then made his own experimental arrangements.
For those who haven't 'therapeutic touch' doesn't really involve touch. Practitioners, or 'healers' -- as they like to be called -- move their hands over patients, claiming that they can heal them by manipulating the 'energy field'. According to its practitioners, this energy field is shared by all humans around them.
Practitioners claim that they can sense energy fields above human skin, which is the basis of Emily's simple experiment. The test was even published in the Journal of the American Medical Association when he was just 11 years old, making him the youngest person to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
The test method is quite simple. Emily would ask practitioners to sit behind the cardboard, with a towel over their head and their hands placed through the two holes in the cardboard. He will then toss a coin. Depending on whether the result was heads or tails, he would place his hand a few centimeters above their left or right hand.
All practitioners had to do was identify their hand which of them had Emily's hand on. This should be easy if they can actually sense the 'human force field', let alone the diseases and conditions they claim can also be detected.
Like other 'alternative' practices, proponents of Therapeutic Touch are reluctant to submit to scientific testing. However, when approached by Emily they assumed that the research of nine year olds would at best be used for a science exhibition for fourth graders.
Overall, 21 agreed to be part of the experiment. The 14 practitioners were given 10 opportunities to prove their abilities, and the seven practitioners were tested 20 times each. Through random chance, they should be able to get the number 50% if their ability can be recognized. But in fact, they only managed to identify with 44% accuracy.
"They were about half right -- which is like guessing," Emily told the Los Angeles Times.
"Of course, they gave various reasons. One said the room was too cold. The other complained that the air conditioner blew out the force field," he continued.
At the time, Therapeutic Touch practitioners claimed that the experiment did not mean their years of therapy had been in vain. They claim many patients have benefited from the results of their work.