Customer Reviews

Therapeutic Touch

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This is the first book to take a critical look at the claims of therapeutic touch (TT). The editors, along with all of the authors in this book, have become familiar with the best evidence (or lack thereof) for TT and do a good job of going over the history, ethical issues, whether it should be used and taught, and if it actually works. Solid investigation has gone into all of these chapters.

TT is probably one of the branches of alternative medicine that is most accepted in the medical establishment (especially by nurses). If you have an interest in alternative medicine, you should definitely read this book to see where the science and evidence lead.

Béla Scheiber and Carla Selby's text, Therapeutic Touch, published by Prometheus books, is an excellent introduction to the nether world of 'human energy healing' modalities like TT. This unfortunate practce is dubiously associated within the nursing profession conflicting with their stated goals to develop more 'evidence based research' in nursing.

This text covers TT's history and some of the hard fought battles to have this "modality" removed from institutions (as the authors themselves had embarked upon). It also provides several articles illustrating what is TT's greatest problem: the inability to explain how this phenomena works and, then, the fields further inability to reproduce any alleged results it had previously claimed to have made.

The only dissappointment I found rested in the fact that there are no in depth articles regarding the un-ethical aspect of health care professionals associating their professions with this unfounded phenomenon. Truly "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." But, as Béla Scheiber and Carla Selby's text clearly illustrates, TT and its proponents are woefully unable to do so.

In a nutshell the book is an easy an excellent read and resource.

The editors may have put this collection of essays together simply because they have an axe to grind with the authors of the JAMA TT study.

Emily Rosa's study was heavily peer-reviewed before JAMA agreed to public it. Yet even Ray Hyman, in the introduction, insults the JAMA authors, insinuating without grounds that they may have behaved like pseudoscientists.

Here's an example of the editors' manipulation of facts to make the JAMA study look bad: Selby and Scheiber attribute to the JAMA authors the claim made by JAMA editor George Lundberg that the study demonstrates that the "human energy field" doesn't exist. Not in the paper. They also claim to know that Emily did not contribute to the writing of the paper. Actually, she did contribute a section of the paper.

The Rebecca Long study is ludicrous, attempting to explain why Emily Rosa's subjects felt something when Emily's study clearly showed that her subjects couldn't reliably detect the presence of her hand.

No wonder JAMA withdrew permission for the editors to reprint the JAMA paper in this book.