Word: tt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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 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 TT practitioners. Obviously mindful of the publicity value of the situation, Journal editor George Lundberg appeared on TV to declare, "Age doesn...
...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 who saw through the emperor's new clothes. Her mother Linda Rosa, a registered nurse, has been campaigning against TT for nearly a decade, and her stepfather Larry Sarner is chairman of the National Therapeutic Touch Study Group, an anti-TT organization...
...knows that a parent's obsession is pretty hard for a kid to avoid taking on, if only subconsciously. (Within half-a-dozen years, of course, Emily might easily be doing the Deepak Chopra thing just to drive her mother crazy.) So while the idea of testing TT was all Emily's, her parents were only too eager to bring her up to speed on the scientific method and statistical analysis. Moreover, mother and stepfather, along with Dr. Stephen Barrett, chairman of an outfit called Quackwatch Inc., helped her write the paper. Linda, in fact, is credited as lead author...
Linda Rosa first got exercised about TT in the late '80s, when she learned it was on the approved list for continuing nursing education in Colorado, along with everything from acupressure to "nurse-assisted near-death experience." TT bugged her more than most. Its 100,000 trained practitioners (48,000 in the U.S.) don't even touch their patients. Instead, they wave their hands a few inches from the patient's body, pushing energy fields around until they're in "balance." TT advocates say these manipulations can help heal wounds, relieve pain and reduce fever. The claims are taken seriously...
...Rosa couldn't find any objective evidence that it works or that these so-called energy fields even exist. To provide such proof, TT therapists would have to sit down for independent testing--something they haven't been eager to do, even though the magician-turned-debunker James Randi has offered more than $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a human energy field. (He's had one taker so far. She failed.) A skeptic might conclude that TT practitioners are afraid to lay their beliefs on the line. But who could turn down an innocent fourth...