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Catching up with eighteenth century science in the evaluation of Therapeutic Touch
Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1998 by Thomas S. Ball, Dean D. Alexander
The experimental room contained a single massage table. A segment of string was looped around the practitioner's neck and tied around the middle finger of his right hand. It was adjusted so that his hand would be poised approximately ten centimeters above the subject's back during the practitioner's scanning movements of his body. A mat was placed so that, once standing on it, the practitioner faced in the direction of and was centered over the subject's lower back. After the experimenter blindfolded the practitioner, he led him to an adjoining room. The experimenter then exited to the experimental room, closed the connecting door and silently signaled the subject to lie on the massage table. He then led the practitioner into the experimental room, informed him of the subject's presence on the massage table, and asked him to assess the subject's current energy level. It was reported as a three on a scale from zero to ten. The procedure was repeated with the subject seated approximately two meters from the practitioner, who was told the subject was absent. The practitioner was then asked to rate the presence of any body energy he could sense. It was zero. This preliminary assessment was conducted to ensure that the practitioner did not feel hampered in his ability to discriminate body energy by constraints imposed by the experimental procedures and to rule out possible negative results attributable to uncontrolled ambient factors such as the electrical field in the room or by skeptical attitudes or vibrations emitted by the experimenter. We then proceeded with the formal trials.
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In a randomized order, the subject was either present or two meters distant from the table in half of the trials. The practitioner was allowed to take as long as he desired for each trial. The practitioner verbalized his present versus absent judgment after exiting the experimental room following each assessment trial. Over a series of ten trials the practitioner discriminated at the chance level. In three of the trials he either reported the subject as present when he was not there or reported him absent when he was actually present. To paraphrase the 1784 Royal commission's conclusions, imagination without a body energy source produces tactile sensations and a body energy source without imagination produces nothing. (Similar results were obtained in another experiment in which two blindfolded practitioners were repeatedly asked to identify one of two subjects that they had preselected on the basis of contrasting levels of energy emissions.)
Another, more extended experiment by Rosa, Rosa, and Sarner (1996) did involve officially recognized practitioners trained in Therapeutic Touch. In this case, however, a blindfolded practitioner had to identify the location of the experimenter's hand, which was randomly placed over one or the other of the practitioner's hands. A series of fifteen practitioners were tested in the ability to make this series of discriminations. None exceeded the chance level of success.
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