Therapeutic Touch:
Reach Out and Dupe Someone?
by Linda Rosa
ACSH Volume 8 Number 3 1996
Nurses do some strange things for their patients. They
hang crystals on IV poles, necklace their patients with
herbs and channel astral entities. But the strangest
nursing practice of all - and the most widespread - may
be Therapeutic Touch (TT). Every day nurses enter
hospital rooms across the U.S. to perform this ritual,
which they claim heals their patients. TT is often
performed without the knowledge of the physician in
charge and usually without the patient's informed
consent.
TT was developed at New York University's school of
nursing by Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N., who first
described it in a 1975 American Journal of Nursing
article claiming that TT could increase blood levels of
the oxygen-carrying molecule hemoglobin. Krieger says
that TT is the healing transfer of prana, an ayurvedic or
Hindu concept of "life force." Others say it
resembles qi, the mystical root of Chinese folk medicine.
You'd assume from its name that TT relies on the
palliative effects of human contact. But actually, it
doesn't involve any touching at all. In TT, a nurse,
sometimes called a healer, waves her hands two to six
inches over the patient's body, working from head to toe.
Her hands interact with a supposed "human energy
field" that surrounds the body. After she detects
"differences" in the field indicating disease
or trauma, her waving hands then smooth or
"unruffle" the patient's energy aura, relieving
discomfort and allowing the body to heal itself.
TT is premised on the notion that there really are
human energy fields that TT can modify. But when the
University of Colorado, a major center of TT activism,
empanelled a blue-ribbon jury to review the science
behind TT, the jury could find no evidence for such
fields.
Although TT practitioners [admit] that the existence
and nature of the energy field is a hypothesis which has
not been confirmed in over 20 years, in practice they
behave as if the energy field were a perceptible reality.
There is virtually no acceptable scientific evidence
concerning the existence or nature of these energy
fields. There is no ongoing research on this concept. . .
nor are there any plans for such research, nor even any
ideas about how such research might be conducted.
TT's proponents dismiss such criticisms as scientific
nitpicking. "[Having] a Ph.D. in physics is not
necessary to understand new theories and the meaning they
may have for nursing practice," says nursing
professor Therese C. Meehan. For her and others, it's
enough that they have seen TT work; whether it has a
scientific basis is irrelevant.
TT researchers have made numerous claims for what the
technique can do. Among the supposed benefits:
- TT accelerates the healing process in 99.5
percent of cases. The rate at which new bone
forms during the healing of fractures, for
example, is more than doubled when TT is used.
- TT strengthens the immune systems of both
practitioners and recipients.
- TT stimulates the circulatory and lymphatic
systems.
- TT relieves the side effects of AIDS, Alzheimer's
disease and thyroid imbalances.
- TT can improve the prognosis for many different
types of cancer.
The studies claiming therapeutic benefits from TT have
serious flaws, however:
- All of them lack a suitable placebo group.
- The numbers of patients in the studies are too
small for the findings to be statistically valid.
- Hardly any of the studies that show benefits from
TT have been conducted "double blind."
(In double-blind studies, neither the patients
nor those judging the outcome know who receives
treatment and who doesn't).
- When well-done studies involving TT-treated
patients and a placebo group have been conducted,
they have failed to find any therapeutic benefit
from TT.
- Studies showing that TT helps patients have not
been replicated.
Quoting again from the Colorado panel's report:
"To date [1994] there is not a sufficient body of
data, both in quality and quantity, to establish TT as a
unique and efficacious healing modality. There are major
gaps in the literature regarding the actual efficacy of
the practice of non-contact TT as a unique healing
modality."
But, its proponents ask, "Even if scientific
support is lacking, what's the harm in doing TT?"
The answer, of course, is that harm can occur in many
ways: when patients neglect effective treatments in favor
of ineffective ones; when false hopes and expectations
are raised; and when insurance, hospital, and
out-of-pocket costs are incurred and no benefit results.
Despite the lack of evidence that TT works, use of the
technique is increasing. TT has now become entrenched in
the nursing profession and is actually accepted as a
standard treatment.
According to its advocates, TT is taught in at least
80 nursing schools, with some schools even giving
graduate credit for it. The National League for Nursing,
the accrediting agency for curricula in nursing schools,
has long promoted TT through books and tapes. Most states
allow nurses to maintain their licenses by taking
continuing-education courses in TT. Staff nurses from
Michigan to Hawaii have been called on the carpet in
their hospitals for refusing to practice TT.
Why has nursing embraced TT?
It helps raise the stature of the profession in the
eyes of patients and nurses as well. A nurse
administering TT becomes a healer on a par with a doctor.
In addition, TT helps augment nurses' incomes. Nurses
opening private practices commonly charge $35 for a
20-minute TT session.
Unfortunately, nursing has no equivalent to medicine's
or dentistry's Councils of Scientific Affairs, which
assess the safety, efficacy and appropriateness of
unregulated procedures. So there is no way for the
profession to formulate a policy against the practice of
TT.
Can the government do anything about an unproven
practice that has gained legitimacy?
If TT's practitioners waved a wand instead of their
hands - particularly a wand connected to a box with some
knobs and dials - then the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) could regulate TT as a medical device, and the
burden would be on its advocates to prove that it works.
But TT involves no devices and, in any event, federal
authorites have no direct control over professional
practice.
The federal government has actually been supporting TT
rather than deterring it. Recently, Congress mandated
that the National Institutes of Health set up an
"Office of Alternative Medicine" (OAM), which
has given for researching the usefulness of TT in
treating stress. The Department of Defense, meanwhile,
has given $355,000 to a University of Alabama team
looking at TT's ability to reduce pain and infection in
burn patients.
Most nurses who practice TT genuinely believe that it
helps patients. But patients should not infer from a
nurse's sincerity or professional credentials that TT is
a valid treatment. In fact, despite TT's widespread use,
there is no evidence that it provides any benefit
whatever.
Linda Rosa , R.N., is a writer in Loveland, CO, and
chair of the Questionable Nurse Practices Task Force of
The National Council Against Health Fraud.
©1997 & 1998 American Council on Science and
Health
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