Catching up with eighteenth century science in the evaluation of Therapeutic Touch

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1998 by Thomas S. Ball, Dean D. Alexander

Eighteenth century research on Mesmer's Animal Magnetism, as well as some contemporary studies, shed light on the misattributions that underlie the persistence of Therapeutic Touch as a movement.

It hardly seems possible that insights promulgated in 1784 could shed new and much needed light on a current scientific issue. Yet in the evaluation of claims for at least one form of paranormal healing, Therapeutic Touch, we have yet to replicate the clear and parsimonious reasoning demonstrated in that bygone era in the investigation of Animal Magnetism. The following historical inquiry is made possible by the fact that Therapeutic Touch is, in many respects, Animal Magnetism in modern dress.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

In the past few years Therapeutic Touch has gained a powerful foothold in the American nursing profession (Bullough and Bullough, 1993; Scheiber and Selby 1996). What is Therapeutic Touch? According to Dolores Krieger, R.N., its leading proponent, "Therapeutic Touch is a healing practice based on the conscious use of the hands to direct or modulate, for therapeutic purposes, selected nonphysical human energies that activate the physical body" (Krieger 1993, 3-4). By centering your consciousness, "you will have stepped into another, often unrealized dimension of yourself" (Krieger 1993, 19). Thusly prepared, through the palms of the hands held slightly above the body, the Therapeutic Touch practitioner can scan the body for every deficit or illness. The evidence that one has detected such "living currents of energy flow" comes through sensations such as tingling, heat, pressure, or elasticity. Following assessment of the patient's energy field, the practitioner, palms facing the patient. and about two or three inches from his body, "rebalances the patient's energies." The practitioner sends energy from her hand chakras (energy centers) through the patient's energy field, thereby inducing a health-promoting energy flow.

In defining this "nonmaterial energy field that I cannot see or taste or smell," Krieger (1993, 16) draws upon metaphors such as that of steam power and electricity. Yet she admits that heat, one of the sensations practitioners sense through their hands, cannot be detected by scientific instruments such as the thermocouple. She concludes, "Obviously Therapeutic Touch deals with a very different aspect or conception of temperature differential than the one we currently understand in biophysics" (Krieger 1993, 31).

The scene changes to France in 1784. Anton Mesmer, a charismatic German physician, sought government approval of his practice of a treatment based on animal magnetism. He considered Animal Magnetism a physical force of supreme interest to the sciences. Mesmer included magnets in many of his treatments. Yet he also believed that this invisible force was contained in his own body and that he could direct it, for therapeutic purposes, from a distance of ten feet or more. He had only to point a finger toward his patient to induce a therapeutic "crisis," such as this one: "Bodies would begin to shake, arms and legs move violently and involuntarily, teeth chatter loudly. Patients would grimace, groan, babble, scream, faint, and fall unconscious" (Gould 1989, 14). With repeated provocation the attacks would gradually become less severe and eventually disappear, and recovery followed.

Mesmer conceptualized Animal Magnetism as a universal force manifested in everything from interplanetary gravitation to the ebb and flow of the sea, in the atmosphere and likewise in the human body where it directly affects the nerves. Magnetic therapy "corrects the unequal distribution of the nervous fluid and its confused movement with its uniform current and produces that condition which I call the harmony of the nerves" (Pattie 1994, 39). In other words, Mesmer was claiming to rebalance the patient's energies more than 200 years before Krieger.

Certain paranormal themes have been reinvented over the centuries in both literate and preliterate societies. Once accepted, they shape thinking that leads to certain common deductions. Krieger does not mention Mesmer. Yet the common and apparently coincidental conceptual origins of Therapeutic Touch and Animal Magnetism are nowhere more evident than in the deduction that the postulated energies can be stored in both animate and inanimate objects. Krieger (1993) noted the following:

Human energies, such as those dealt with in Therapeutic Touch can be directed intentionally into a wad of ordinary cotton batting. Cotton so treated will store the energy for a length of time, during which the energy can be felt by another person as a "fact" (p. 49).

The Polynesians attributed much the same characteristics to "mana," their concept of a universal, impersonal energy which could be stored in persons, objects, and places. Likewise, Mesmer believed he could communicate the "magnetic material" to such objects as bread, glass, steel, water, dogs, and human beings, leaving them charged with Animal Magnetism. We shall see the part that this belief played in the experimental evaluation of Animal Magnetism.

Featured Download

Speak Like a CEO

Catching up with eighteenth century science in the evaluation of Therapeutic Touch

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1998 by Thomas S. Ball, Dean D. Alexander

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: News

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference