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A nine-year-old schoolgirl single-handedly cooks up a science-fair experiment that ends up debunking a widely practiced medical treatment. Emily Rosa’s target was a practice known as therapeutic touch (TT for short), whose advocates manipulate patients’ "energy field" to make them feel better and even, say some, to cure them of various ills. Yet Emily’s test shows that these energy fields can’t be detected, even by trained TI’ practitioners. Obviously mindful of the publicity value of the situation, Journal editor George Lundberg appeared on TV to declare, "Age doesn’t matter. It’s good science that matters, and this is good science."
Emily’s mother Linda Rosa, a registered nurse, has been campaigning against TI’ for heady a decade. Linda first thought about TT in the late ’80s, when she learned it was on the approved list for continuing
nursing education in Colorado. Its 100,000 trained practitioners (48,000 in the U. S. ) don’t even touch their patients. Instead, they waved their hands a few inches from the patient’s body, pushing energy fields around until they’ re in "balance." TI’ advocates say these manipulations can help heal wounds, relieve pain and reduce fever. The claims are taken seriously enough that TT therapists are frequently hired by leading hospitals, at up to $ 70 an hour, to smooth patients’ energy, sometimes during surgery.
Yet Rosa could not find any evidence that it works. To provide such proof, TF therapists would have to sit down for independent testing-some- thing they haven’t been eager to do, even though James Randi has offered more than $ 1 million to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a human cncrgy field. (He’s had one taker so far. She failed. ) A skeptic might conclude that TF practitioners are afraid to lay their beliefs on the line. But who could turn down an innocent fourth-grader Says Emily: "I think they didn’t take me very’ seriously because I’m a kid."
The experiment was straight forward! 21 TT therapists stuck their hands, palms up, through a screen. Emily held her own hand over one of theirs-left or right-and the practitioners had to say which hand it was. When the results were recorded, they’d done no better than they would have by simply guessing. If there was an energy field, they couldn’t feel it.
Very few TT practitioners responded to the $ I million offer because