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A GenePoool.com Essay
Therapeutic Touch
I got a bit of a surprise when I opened my Wednesday (Aug. 6, 1998) morning edition of the Boston Globe last week.
Since Sunday, a special investigative report on the latest developments in cancer research, detection, and treatment had been running in installments on the front page. This day's installment was called "The Mainstream Widens" and it included a photo that is difficult to adequately describe. Essentially, the image is of a woman hovering over a hospital patient, her hands outstretched and inches away. This was a demonstration of the latest in what I can only describe as a fad: Therapeutic Touch.
The article went on to quote various patients and oncologists regarding this method of therapy. The oncologists go so far as to say they suggest it to patients who are having trouble controlling pain, and many hospitals now keep a TT practitioner on staff for just such a reason. Patients report a lessening of pain as a result of TT intervention.
I also happen to know that both the National League of Nurses and the American Nurses Association publicly endorse Therapeutic Touch. It is possible for nurses to obtain formal training in the skill. And the government has even doled out grant monies to study TT in an effort to understand it better.
This amounts to quite a lot of positive support for Therapeutic Touch. A casual reader of the Globe article might be prepared to laud the medical doctors quoted for being so open-minded as to accept such an effective, albeit non-traditional, therapy. (I should menton that not all of the above information came from the article.)
So you may wonder why I was shocked to see the front page story. See, the only problem with all of this is that Therapeutic Touch is a truckload of nonsense.
Here's the idea. There is an energy field surrounding the human body. Sickness, or pain, is essentially a manifestation of a problem with this energy field. So in order to cure the sickness or take away the pain the energy field needs to be re-aligned. The Therapeutic Touch practitioner's job is to adjust the energy field. You might think from looking at the Globe photo that the practitioner was about to touch the patient, but this is not the case; no contact is actually made.
I think this is a marvelous concept, and lacking only in one small detail; there IS no energy field surrounding the human body.
TT proponents have a few different answers for this rather significant flaw in their explanation. The first is Kirlian photography. This is a marvelous method of picture-taking which reveals a glowing "aura" surrounding people, and seems to indicate that there is, in fact, a field surrounding us. However, photos of dead leaves and rocks also yield an aura. Last I heard, TT practitioners weren't going about healing broken stones. I could be wrong.
The second answer is much more entertaining. Apparently, the energy field does exist, but can only be detected by practitioners.
I call this the Dragon In My Garage defense, named after a clever metaphor developed by Carl Sagan and Richard Franklin. The Dragon In My Garage argument is as follows.
I tell you I have a fire-breathing dragon living in my garage. I bring you to see it, but you can see no dragon. It is, I point out, invisible. You check for fire, but I point out that it uses special, room temperature fire that is also invisible. So, you start to grope around for the dragon, but of course, you don't find one that way either, because it's also non-corporeal. Likewise, it's hovering, so there's no evidence of footprints. Having eventually exhausted every test you can think of, you ask me how it's possible for me to claim that there is actually a dragon living in my garage. My reply? Only I can sense it, but I know it's there. It's not my problem if you can't detect it; it's YOUR problem.
If there is an energy aura surrounding the human body that no scientific tools can detect, no non-practitioner can feel, and can only be found by "experts" then I'm sorry, but it only exists in the mind of the "experts."
But let's pretend it does exist, just for fun. Can practitioners actually detect the "flaws" in this field in order to "adjust" it?
In 1995, an experiment was conducted by a woman named Emily Rosa to test this claim. She devised a very clever double-blind test to determine whether TT practitioners could distinguish between a healthy human wrist and an injured human wrist. There were two phases to the experiment. First, the subject with the injured wrist stuck his wrist in an opaque plastic sheathe while in full view of the TT practitioner to make sure it was possible for the practitioner to detect the aura through the sheathe. In all of these tests the practitioner scored with 100% accuracy. Next, the subject was moved behind a wall with a plastic sheathe through it. Only the subject knew when the wrist was in the sheathe and when it wasn't; neither the TT practitioner nor the experimenters did (hence the double-blind.) The result, in 280 tests involving 21 different TT practitioners, was that not one of them scored any better than chance. Whether they knew it or not, the practitioners were guessing. The most astounding thing about this test, though, is that Emily Rosa was only nine years old at the time. This was a class science project. The study has since been written up in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
(I bring this up because sometimes it's healthy to point out that nonsense detection is not a difficult skill; it does, however, need to be cultivated at times.)
So the critical question becomes, why does it work? Well, the short answer is, it doesn't, not really. What DOES work is the human mind's ability to help itself.
The placebo effect is one of the better-documented examples of apparent mind-over-matter. Say you have fifty patients in need of pain medication. Half of them you give active painkillers, to the other half you administer harmless sugar pills. Of the twenty-five patients who receive the sugar pills, some (though not all,) will experience a lessening of pain. What does this prove? Confidence in the effectiveness if a treatment, coupled with confidence in a trusted source (the doctor) creates a therapeutic state of mind. Positive thoughts help.
There is nothing magical about this. The placebo effect is very useful in helping the body's natural ability to help itself. But good thoughts aren't going to do anything for colon cancer, or appendicitis, or a brain tumor.
So in essence, if you accept in good faith the efficacy of Therapeutic Touch, it WILL help you, especially if you're more inclined to accept the wild claims of this pseudoscience over the comparatively sober assessments of medical science. And if you assigned magical powers to the color blue and wore a blue bandanna to soothe your pain you'd probably find it has the same effect.
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--from the Boston Globe, Letters to the Editor, Friday, August 14, 1998
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE'S MENTAL SUGAR PILL
Regarding the Aug. 6 front-page story, "The mainstream widens":
The essential philosophy behind therapeutic touch is that there is an energy field surrounding the human body, and that illness is the result of this energy field being misaligned. The practitioner's role is to realign the energy field.
The problem here is that there is no such energy field. This would seem to be a minimum requirement for therapeutic touch to succeed. In double-blind tests, practitioners of therapeutic touch have been unable to distinguish between an unhealthy energy field and a healthy energy field.
Similarly, qi gong is based on the assumption that there are seven energy centers in the human body-- energy centers that do not exist. Acupuncture and acupressure rely on a similar nonexistent energy field.
All of these alternative modalities are excellent examples of the placebo effect. Practitioners make no illusion of the fact that in order for these modalities to work, patients must accept that they will work, which should send up a red flag to anybody who's paying attention.
Your assertion that there have been no tests of any of these modalties is incorrect, as is the claim that medical science cannot explain how they work or if they work. What's going on is very clearly understood.
An oncologist who recommends a therapeutic touch practitioner for a patient who is in pain is giving the patient a mental sugar pill, and I suspect the oncologist knows this. Don't contribute to the belief that it's anything more than that.
Gene Doucette, Cambridge, MA
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© 2000, Gene Doucette
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