[The freep][news][Health] [news area navigation map]Touch-therapy advocates in [Image] uproar over girl's study April 1, 1998 [Search] BY GINA KOLATA New York Times NEW YORK -- Two years ago, Emily Rosa of Loveland, Colo., designed and carried out an experiment that challenges a leading treatment in alternative medicine. Her study, reported today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has thrown the field into tumult. Emily is 11. She did the experiment for her fourth-grade science fair. The technique she challenges is therapeutic touch, in which healers manipulate what they call the "human-energy field" by passing their hands over a patient's body without actually touching it. The method is practiced throughout the world and is taught at prominent universities and nursing schools. Tens of thousands of people have been trained to treat patients through the use of therapeutic touch. Its practitioners insist the human-energy field is real and that anyone can be trained to feel it. But Emily asked a sort of "emperor's new clothes" type of question: Could practitioners actually detect a human-energy field? It was a question critics of alternative medicine had asked before. But only one practitioner agreed to submit to a test, said James Randi, a magician who conducted the test. Emily, however, was able to recruit 21 practitioners. Her mother, Linda Rosa, a nurse who is among the critics of therapeutic touch, said she believed Emily succeeded because practitioners were not threatened by a 9-year-old. Rosa said Emily originally was designing a science-fair experiment involving different colored M&M candies. Then she glanced at the television screen in her home where her mother was watching a videotape about therapeutic touch. Emily piped up, saying she had a way to test the premise of therapeutic touch, her mother said. Emily designed an experiment in which she and the healer were separated by a screen. Then Emily decided, by flipping a coin, whether to put her hand over the healer's left or right hand. The healer was asked to say where Emily's hand was hovering. If healers could detect Emily's human-energy field, they should be able to discern where Emily's hand was. In 280 tests involving the 21 practitioners, the healers did no better than chance. They identified the correct location of Emily's hand just 44 percent of the time; if they guessed at random, they would have been right about half the time. Emily wrote her study with her mother. The report on the study is accompanied by a note from Dr. George Lundberg, the journal's editor. Lundberg said the journal's statisticians thought the study was well done. "They were amazed by its simplicity and by the clarity of its results," he said. Practitioners hardly agree. "I do hope it's an April Fool's joke," said Dr. Dolores Krieger, an emeritus professor of nursing at New York University who is a developer of therapeutic touch. Practitioners of therapeutic touch say that patients who are ill have hot or cold spots in their fields or areas that feel tingly. By "rebalancing" a person's field, practitioners say they can calm colicky babies, relieve symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, treat cancer and more. MORE HEALTH STORIES FREEP FRONT | NEWS FRONT [navigation bar] All content © copyright 1998 Detroit Free Press and may not be republished without permission.