Word: experimention
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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It sounds like the plot of a made-for-TV movie: an inquisitive nine-year-old Colorado schoolgirl single-handedly cooks up a science-fair experiment that ends up debunking a flaky but widely practiced medical treatment. And she does such a professional job of it that the study gets...
Preposterous though it seems, that's pretty much what happened last week when Emily Rosa's experiment was written up in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Rosa's target was a practice known as therapeutic touch (TT for short), whose proponents manipulate patients' "energy fields" to make them...
Before we go direct to HBO, though, it's worth noting that like most good science-fair projects, this one got some help from Mom and Dad. Emily Rosa, now 11, is smart and determined, and really did carry out the experiment, but she is not quite the naive child...
The experiment was straightforward: 21 TT therapists stuck their hands, palms up, through a screen. Emily held her own hand over one of theirs--left or right, decided by the flip of a coin--and the practitioners had to say which hand it was. When the results were tallied, they...
That's a pretty weak defense. A stronger one is that many patients really do say they feel better after TT treatment. Emily's experiment shows that TT does not work the way its advocates claim. But what nobody has done--neither Emily nor the die-hard skeptics who were...