NOTE: This page is linked from: http://www.voicenet.com/~eric/tt The following came from a Duke newspaper (my comments at end of this) Subject: duke newspaper article and response Author: seske001 Date: 4/20/98 3:32 PM Dear Editor, This letter refers to Dr. Burk's Noosphere article about the JAMA Therapeutic Touch (TT) research. These are weaknesses in the Rosa study but I don't believe cheating either conscious or unconscious was present. In fact, part of it was videotaped for accuracy and verifiability. I was shocked to see the study published in JAMA. JAMA yields great credibility and seriousness in the medical community, also it represents a standard of science. A fourth grade science project with a sampling of 21 that doesn't find something, is quite a stretch for a serious scientific journal to accept. I wonder what ever else they might publish within that genre of "scientific" research that "proves" categorically something doesn't exist. Many skeptics and scientists who are interested in TT seek a demonstration of the ability to "feel the human energy field (HEF)" in a double blind study. Most Therapeutic or Healing Touch practitioners report they have this skill. This would seem to be a testable claim. Jim Lane in Behavioral Medicine and I have taken this on as a research study. Rosa tried to study this one piece of TT but then made broad statements about TT's ineffectiveness. An important point that we have emphasized with our practitioners is that our study is not a measure of healing ability, or effectiveness of the technique. It is solely a test of the skill of "feeling the HEF off the body." Both Rosa and we are taking apart a 5 part technique (TT) that is integrated and intended to be therapeutic for a sick/hurting person and studying it in a non-clinical, laboratory environment. The heart of healing/being therapeutic is removed. Perhaps the "active ingredient" in TT is the caring presence of a concerned person not the "feeling the energy field." Practice of this "skill" in the experimental environment may be very important for a successful outcome. One days work does not good science make. This is another weakness in Rosa's study. Many important scientific discoveries would not have been made if one day, week, year's failures were taken as the end point. Jon Seskevich Medical Center ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: 4/8/98 commentary Author: burk0001 at Elicpse Date: 4/6/98 7:01 PM Chronicle Commentary - 4/8/98 The Noosphere - Larry Burk Intentionality must be considered in Alternative Medicine Research April Fool's Day was marked by two noteworthy events centered around the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of which received a tremendous amount of publicity. The April 1st issue of the Journal featured a media-hyped article debunking therapeutic touch based on the fourth grade science fair project of an 11 year old girl. The April 1st event that went unnoticed, but was likely more significant, was the passing of the deadline for the Journal's general call for scientific papers on alternative medicine to be published in a special theme issue this fall. Therapeutic touch is a widely practiced but controversial nursing technique which is a medicalized version of "laying on of hands." This approach to healing through the "energy field" around the body has been taught to thousands of nurses including many at Duke Hospital. Much research demonstrating a variety of beneficial effects has been done, however skeptics criticize that these studies were not scientifically rigorous enough to validate the claims. The recent study was a simple randomized single blind trial which tested the ability of 21 therapeutic touch practitioners to detect the presence of the energy field of the young experimenter's hand from a distance of 8 to 10 cm. The subjects, who were asked to place both arms through a screen, were expected to be able to tell which of their hands, right or left, the girl placed her own hand above as determined by a random toss of dice. The practitioners were correct only 44% of the time which is less than chance, seeming to invalidate one of the central claims of therapeutic touch, the ability to reliably detect a human energy field. However, the study has several methodological limitations including the lack of a comparison control group and is also flawed for one other reason having to do with the possible effects of intentionality which was probably not even considered by the Journal's reviewers. The above approach may be fine for Newtonian science experiments typical of modern biomedicine, but may not be appropriate for experiments regarding postmodern concepts of consciousness and energy which underly many of the claims of alternative medicine techniques. The intent of the experimenter, an impressionable young girl whose mother and research collaborator is a member of a national organization of skeptics, may have been a factor. Such an "experimenter effect" is well illustrated in a recent study involving a balanced collaboration between a skeptic and a non-skeptic. Marilyn Schlitz, the director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, designed a rigorous randomized trial evaluating whether blinded subjects could detect another person staring at them from a distance which yielded statistically significant positive results. When her skeptical colleague, British psychologist Richard Wiseman, failed to replicate the results, he invited her to England to repeat the experiment along with him in two separate but equal trials using the same subjects and the same equipment, and once again she got positive results and he got negative ones. Ironically, the Journal may have unwittingly published an article which provides supporting evidence for the experimenter effect. When the experimental data is reevaluated with this possibility in mind, the subjects' performance was below chance by a statistically significant amount, p = 0.04. Unless some undiscovered systematic error was involved, the two most likely explanations would be that either the girl unconsciously cheated to satisfy the expectations of her mother or that her skeptical bias had some other negative influence on the results. The exact mechanism by which conscious intent might affect experimental results in this fashion remains unexplained, but the collaborative approach of Schlitz and Wiseman may provide a model for future research in this field. In fact, similar therapeutic touch research of a more balanced and rigorous nature will soon be completed at Duke by nurse clinician Jon Seskevich and psychophysiologist Jim Lane. Perhaps their research will also be published in the Journal, for despite the debunking nature of the April Fool's Day article, the recent call for papers is evidence of a shift in attitude of the Journal's senior staff in the past year. For 1998, the editorial board ranked alternative medicine among the top 3 of 68 subjects to be addressed in the coming year, compared to 68th of 73 in the previous year. The fact that a recent survey of the Journal's physician readers ranked alternative medicine the 7th most important topic out of 73 might have something to do with this shift in editorial policy. Another factor could be that Jim Dalen, the editor of one of the AMA's other journals, the Archives of Internal Medicine, is the Dean of the University of Arizona School of Medicine where popular medical author Andy Weil has established his Fellowship Program in Integrative Medicine. The actual intent of the Journal's senior staff remains to be seen. Hopefully the importance of the experimenter effect will be taken into account in evaluating future research. In "Nature and Purpose," scientist/priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin notes that "nothing less imposing than the significance of our lives is bound up with the quest for a union of mind and nature established on solid grounds compatible with reason, common sense and science." ================================================== From: OBRL-News To: obrl-news@lists.village.Virginia.EDU Subject:- AMA/Skeptics Fail to Debunk Therapeutic Touch Orgone Biophysical Research Lab http://id.mind.net/community/orgonelab/index.htm Forwarded News Item Please copy and distribute to other interested individuals and groups ********** Continuing the discussion about "Emily's Cold Hands"... We recently obtained an email copy of theJournal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article attempting to debunk Therapeutic Touch (TT), which has got a lot of news coverage. > A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch > Linda Rosa, BSN, RN; Emily Rosa; Larry Sarner; Stephen > Barrett, MD Unfortunately, the article is much too long to post out to OBRL-News. However, for those who are interested, the full text of the article can be found at: http://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/journals/most/recent/issues/jama/joc71352.htm While the article itself is basically propaganda, it does contain a good number of citations on the issue of therapeutic touch which should be of interest to many. It also documents the widespread and growing interest in Therapeutic Touch (TT), which is the main reason why the "skeptic" authors and the AMA took aim at the practice. Here, I can review a few of the problems and blatent errors in the article, observed after only a short review. A more comprehensive rebuttal should come from the TT practitioners, but here's my contribution. Even if we put aside the broader objection of the AMA's past history of unethical and unscientific attacks against natural healing methods, the conclusions of the published JAMA study on TT do not rationally flow from the data presented (another big problem in medical journals). After many paragraphs of dismissive and prejudicial discussion of TT, the article considers the experiments of "Emily", a 6th grade student who was helped by her "skeptic-nurse" mom. The study was constructed OK as a pilot study and from a mechanical-technical standpoint, requiring a TT practitioner to place their hands behind an opaque screen and then to report over which of their hands, right or left, the young Emily had been holding her hand. The study reported an accuracy rate of around 44%, on average from multiple tests with 21 different TT practitioners. From there, the authors concluded -- inaccurately and unwarrantedly -- that TT had no healing effects, and that the human energy field did not exist. Indeed, a large part of the article was dedicated to debunking the concept of the human energy field. So it is not surprising to see, on closer inspection, that the experiment carried at least one fatal design flaw which virtually guaranteed that no result would be forthcoming. It is fairly well known in circles that investigate TT from a scientific viewpoint, that studies on TT must be constructed in a manner which encompasses the practitioners emotional interest in the well-being of a sick person needing help. The emotions of the therapist must be engaged and empathy must be genuinely felt. Otherwise, it will not work. Dr. Bernard Grad proved this with various healers, by attempting to have them induce a change in the structure of water changed by having the water subject to a "healing". The method of evaluation was by spectroscopical examination. What was learned, was that the healer could not be encouraged to feel much empathy for a test tube filled with water. But when the tube was placed into the shirt pocket of a sick person, close to the place where the TT practitioner would put their hands during a healing session, the water was changed in structure. Grad demonstrated similar capacities with other methods, but in all cases the emotions of the TT practitioner were centrally necessary. From this, one could have predicted a failure of the "Emily experiment". Asking a therapist to "feel my hands" behind a screen is not the same thing as the more emotional motivation of helping another human being in genuine distress and pain. Emily's experiment, published in the JAMA, failed because the experiment assumed emotional engagement was unimportant. But even so, the failure of this one small experiment would not allow anyone to conclude that TT has no healing effects on sick people, or that the human energy field did not exist. Both of those latter considerations are far more broad and complex than than the simple "can you feel my hands" experiment of Emily. But that is what the JAMA article concluded, and indeed hammered away about. The JAMA article also reviewed a large body of published literature on TT, making an assessment of various other quantitative experiments on the subject -- but here the article also drew unwarranted conclusions. Consider this quoted paragraph: " ... a University of Alabama at Birmingham research team declared that their own imminent study (financed by a $335,000 federal grant) would be "the first real scientific evidence" for TT.[117,118] This project compared the effects of TT and sham TT on the perception of pain by burn patients. The final report to the funding agency noted statistically significant differences in pain and anxiety in 3 of 7 subjective measurements, but there was no difference in the amount of pain medication requested.[119] " The article ignored the key sentence "statistically significant differences in pain and anxiety in 3 of 7 subjective measurements", and continued on to discuss TT as ineffective. Similarly, in discussing a variety of other studies on TT: " Of the 74 quantitative studies, 23 were clearly unsupportive. Eight reported no statistically significant results,[16,58,98-103] 3 admitted to having inadequate samples,[22,56,104] 2 were inconclusive,[11,105] and 6 had negative findings.[106-111] Four attempted independent replications but failed to support the original findings.[112-115] To our knowledge, no attempt to conduct experiments to reconcile any of these unsupportive findings has been reported. " >From this, we see the JAMA authors criticise and dismiss 46 of the 74 quantitative studies as being "unsupportive" or "inconclusive", without statistical significance, with "inadequate samples" or "negative findings" which "failed to support the original findings". Even if we grant they are totally correct about those 46 studies, they say nothing at all about the remaining 28 studies. Given that the entire article is authored by self-described "skeptics" who include discussion of the "James Randi Foundation", the "National Council Against Health Fraud" and other well-known skeptic "quack-busting" groups, we rationally could expect the authors to scour each of those published quantitative studies on TT for any telling flaw that could be used to disqualify them. Since the authors do not mention any problems with the remaining 28 studies, it suggests those 28 studies were probably fairly solid and conclusive in their support of TT, with statistically significant outcomes, using adequate samples, etc. But nothing is said about this in the conclusions. The 28 supportive studies are simply mentioned, but quicky dropped without any elaborating details. The discussion and conclusions of the JAMA article continue on to trash TT as if it does not ever work, and as if there is nothing to it. Such is the unscientific prejudice of the "skeptics", and of the JAMA editorial board which approved the article. Since science does not proceed by majority vote ("28 studies Aye, 46 studies Nay"), the 28 studies mentioned above may well constitute a core of evidence documenting the phenomenon, perhaps even proving the phenomenon is real and objective. As I have not examined them, I cannot say -- but the failure of the JAMA article to go into detail about those studies is telling. Many other studies positive and supporting to TT are similarly cited in the article, but subsequently dismissed without serious evaluation. Consequently, it is illogical and unwarranted for the JAMA article to conclude that TT "is ineffective" or that the human energy field "does not exist". This kind of sweeping-aside of positive evidence, and drawing conclusions not supported by any data, is unfortunately too typical of the orthodox medical profession and their "skeptics" friends, and itself constitutes a form of scientific fraud -- the willful and purposefull obscuring of evidence which does not support one's prejudiced viewpoint. In this case, it is designed to persuade journalists to uncritically report a prejudiced conclusion, no matter what the evidence. And it appears to have worked, given the highly-coordinated media blitz which spread the news about "Emily" in such a widespread manner. Probably, some TT practitioners are quite good, while others are not so good or even ineffective. There is a pressing need for quantitative studies to evaluate these issues -- but the skeptics groups have so thoroughy discredited themselves as arbiters of critical issues in the sciences that nothing they or the AMA would publish today can be taken at face value. James DeMeo, Ph.D. ********** OBRL News is a product of the non-profit Orgone Biophysical Research Lab Greensprings Research and Educational Center PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA http://id.mind.net/community/orgonelab/index.htm demeo@mind.net ============================================ The following is a note to me from Pat K.: Over the weekend I read over the long report on Emily's TT and I also read the article in JAMA. That is why I waited to make comment, I wanted to read everything over. May I say the following: 1. In reading the JAMA article by E. Rosa, somehow (I might be wrong) but I think that someone else wrote that article. It is just a bit too structured. It read like something that was taken verbatim from something else. It is the structured way that the article is written; as I mentioned to you before people tend to lie with statistics. It was extremely statistically written and just too word-for-word; I think that somebody sponsored the article. 2. What I really think is that here you have the power and influence of people like the pharmaceutical manufacturers and the American Medical Association. An example would be on page 4 of 20 in the long TT report on Emily. Down toward the end of the page there is an indication that the practices has been safe and helpful in improving conditions from premenstrual syndrome, headaches, burns and bone fractures to asthma........... Take a person who might get bad headaches or a menacing premenstrual syndrome --- if they can have a TT treatment for relief (assuming that it might work for them); then that eliminates a doctor visit as well as a prescription. 3. I agree with Hutchinson's opinion on page 4 of 20 as well: magazines and mainstreams are all grounded in money and power. You are dealing here with very powerful groups. The media are another group that are affected greatly by strong forces. ================================= Here's an editorial that appeared in the Baltimore Sun May 26th. The writer is described as "a former Evening Sun columnist". The Evening Sun was the Baltimore Sun's sister paper until it folded last year. -------------------------------- Healing touch By Elise Chisolm LAST month, part of a newspaper headline stopped me in my tracks. It proclaimed: "Therapeutic Touch Flunks the Test." Anything about alternative therapy catches my eye. After all, such treatment ended 15 years of chronic back pain for me. The newspaper article was about a Colorado girl, Emily Rosa, now 11, co-author with her parents and another researcher of a study apparently debunking therapeutic touch, an increasingly popular alternative treatment. First a school science project, the study was later published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. She must be an amazing kid. She did the experiment when she was 9. The investigation found that 21 practitioners of therapeutic touch could not reliably detect another person's "energy field," contrary to one of the practice's central tenets. So, according to Emily, the practitioners failed the test. Popular therapy Today, however, this alternative treatment is practiced by about 43,000 health care professionals and more than 100,000 people worldwide have been trained in the technique. It is used in about 80 hospitals in North America. The practice has been in use since ancient times. It is used to treat such ailments as chronic pain, surgical wounds, burns and high blood pressure. The practitioners hold or move their hands a few inches above a patient's body, which is said to realign "energy fields" disturbed by illness. So Emily and her mother, a nurse, who had been amassing a large file debunking therapeutic touch, felt their short study was conclusive. It is unusual that a fourth-grader would submit an experiment through her science class to the prestigious JAMA. The editors must have said, "Wow, what a story, let's print it. " Many physicians still resist alternative medicines, even acupuncture. After all, they don't want their practices to be tarnished or diminished by anything that is not in their medical textbooks, do they? But many of their patients aren't listening. Americans spent $1.13 billion in 1993 on medicinal herbs, according to the American Medical Association. One in three Americans has used some form of alternative therapy. Doctors who are open to such therapies herald them as a new approach to "integrated medicine" -- a complement to tradition medicine. Good. Many touch therapists are disputing the results of Emily's small-scale experiment. Good. While little scientific evidence may back their claims, anecdotal evidence abounds. I have seen massage therapy, which is similar to touch therapy, work wonders. I know a child who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990 and then treated to many sessions with a massage therapist; the disease has been in remission for years. I saw a cancer patient receive touch therapy while undergoing 30 radiation treatments. He has no more pain and has been cancer-free for five years. First, with human touch comes a message of peace and hope for the person in pain, and anything that combines those two is worth embracing. If it's all in the mind, so be it. A key relationship Often, getting well is the result of a partnership. The sufferer must connect with the caregiver. With babies, the touch of the mother is an all-consuming healing technique. Hospital nurseries confirm this fact. In 1978 a healing touch helped me walk again. It was Easter Sunday and I was in my 17th day of a hospital stay for a spinal fusion. I awoke with a terrible depressed feeling of abandonment; I was alone, and it hurt to try to get up. Then a tall Haitian nurse with a divine gleam in her eyes came into my room and said, "Happy Easter, darling, let me help you stand." She put her hands on my back and moved them in a circular motion and helped me get up. She asked me if the pain was leaving. It was. After that, I walked a little bit better each day. Eventually, three years of deep accupressure massage relieved me of years of chronic pain. The thousands of Americans who have had such success with touch therapy or massage therapy can't be wrong. A massage therapist with a medical clinic told me recently that she has seen wonderful results from her practice -- and most of her patients are doctors. Elise Chisolm is a former Evening Sun columnist. Originally published on May 26 1998 -------------------------------------------------- ========================= Eric Krieg's impression of the anti-Emily backlash: I don't think many young children have cold hands - if TT readers have trouble with colder patients, they should be taught to warn such people the treatment doesn't work. For the excuse, "she was putting out negative energy" - fine, lets do a proper test with believers looking for energy in other believers and skeptics just monitoring tests. For people that whine, "her folks did the work" - I talked with her on the phone, she's no idiot - yes her parents probably helped her a lot as any proud parent would. Even if the work is ALL from the parents, it still raises important considerations. For the objection, "if we can't read energy, so what? -we can still heal" - I say, if you can't read energy - stop taking money (and opening yourself to fraud charges) while saying you can. If TT can not locate energy but still heal, then lets do tests to home in on that claim - they are more hard, but still doable. I would think the proper reaction of people criticizing Emily's tests would be to simply propose or better yet also perform tests of their own. Eric Krieg