Emily's Little Experiment

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

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 published in a prestigious medical journal, landing her on just about every front page and news broadcast in the nation--where, naturally, she comes off as poised and confident.

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't matter. It's good science that matters, and this is good science."

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 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.

Anyone who's been a kid 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 enough that TT therapists are frequently hired by leading hospitals, at up to $70 an hour, to smooth patients' energy, sometimes during surgery. Your insurance company may cover TT.

Yet 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-grader? Says Emily: "I think they didn't take me very seriously because I'm a kid." Bad move, as it turned out.

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'd done no better than they would have by simply guessing. If there was an energy field, they couldn't feel it. Emily is quick to point out that her test must be replicated before it's considered definitive. But it isn't good news for the TT community.

TT supporters, predictably, attacked the study. Says Dolores Krieger, professor emerita of nursing at New York University, who founded TT in 1972: "It's a cute idea, but it's not valid. The way her subjects sat is foreign to TT, and our hands are moving, not stationary. You don't just walk into a room and perform--it's a whole process."

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 so quick to champion her findings--is try to understand why TT does anything at all. Maybe it's just a placebo effect. Maybe the simple fact that someone is hovering over you, paying attention to you, has therapeutic value. But, if so, that's not such a bad thing. And what harm would there be in learning how to do it better?