Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

I should also mention one interesting aspect of homeopathy that I was unaware of until I read Kleijnen, Knipschild, and ter Riet (1991). Homeopathic treatments are apparently, at least in Europe, widely used in agriculture. The authors cite a review (Scofield 1984) of this field that concluded that “despite the great deal of experimental and clinical work there is only little evidence to suggest that homeopathy is effective. This is because of bad design, execution, reporting or failure to repeat experimental work” (Kleijnen et al. p. 321).

More recently, Wagner (1997) has reviewed studies published since the two previously mentioned reviews. Once again, the results were not supportive of any effectiveness of homeopathic treatments. Wagner discusses one study of homeopathic treatment of diarrhea (Jacobs et al. 1994) that is often touted as proving that homeopathic treatment works. Children in Nicaragua suffering from diarrhea were given either a homeopathic treatment or a placebo. It is important to note that the children with the worst cases of diarrhea were not included in the study, a serious biasing problem. In addition, there was not a third group that got a diarrhea treatment known to be effective. These problems aside, the results were far from impressive. The children in the two groups were evaluated each day for a five-day period. There was a significant difference favoring the homeopathically treated group only for the third day. The two groups were the same on the other four days. This is not, to say the least, terribly impressive evidence for homeopathy. A more detailed critique of this study has been published by Sampson and London (1995).

Since the Wagner (1997) review, Taylor et al. (2000) have published a study in which homeopathy was compared to a placebo for treatment of “allergic rhinitis,” nasal congestion caused by allergic reactions to pollen, dust, and the like. On a measure of the amount of relief provided, the homeopathic treatment and the placebo were rated as equally effective by the subjects. The homeopathic treatment group did show a greater change in a measure called nasal inspiratory peak flow . However, as Ramey (quoted in Raso 2000) notes, this measure is “simply too unreliable to be of any use as a clinical measurement” and it is no longer used clinically “as a measurement of anything” (p. 41).

The idea that “laying on of hands” can treat disease dates back thousands of years. As was seen in chapter 10, it plays a major role in religious faith healing. In this section I will discuss a more secular version of the laying on of hands, one that has come to be known as Therapeutic Touch and since the mid-1970s has become more and more popular in the nursing profession. The term Therapeutic Touch is a misnomer since the practitioner , as he or she is called, does not actually touch the patient, but moves the hands over the patients body, keeping a space between. This version of the laying on of hands was developed in the 1960s and 1970s mostly by Dolores Krieger, a nurse on the faculty at New York University in New York City, and Dora van Gelder Kunz, an Indonesian-born mystic and self-claimed clairvoyant. Stahiman (2000) provides more details of the history of Therapeutic Touch.

The idea behind therapeutic touch is that by passing her hands over a person’s body, a Therapeutic Touch practitioner can detect the aura or human energy field. Further, in individuals who are ill, the practitioner can, through some mechanism that is never specified, detect disturbances in the field and “realign” the field, helping to restore health. This set of claims raises three specific issues that are, at least theoretically, separate. The first is whether the human energy field, as postulated by supporters of Therapeutic Touch, exists at all. The second centers around the question of whether practitioners can, in fact, detect any energy field that may exist. The third is the empirical question of whether Therapeutic Touch really results in demonstrable improvement over and above placebo and other effects. These three issues will be considered in order.

The question of whether a human energy field actually exists is really a question of physics. Does the human body actually generate some kind of field that might be detected by human hands? The answer is yes. The human body does constantly put out an electromagnetic field of sorts—we radiate heat, at least when we are alive and, sometimes—as during decomposition—when we aren’t. Heat is simply a type of electromagnetic energy, one that happens to lie in the infrared range. Devices such as infrared sensors and cameras with special film can easily detect the electromagnetic energy in this range. Our infrared radiation will be important in the discussion below of just what it might be that Therapeutic Touch practitioners are detecting when they claim to be sensing a human energy field. Such practitioners, of course, are not claiming that they are detecting something as mundane as body heat. The human energy field is, they argue, something previously unknown to science: a new type of energy, previously undetected by physicists. But how plausible is this claim? Whatever type of energy it is, it is strong enough to be sensed by some sort of sensory system in the practitioner’s hands. As Stenger (2000) has pointed out, physicists have long had the ability to measure astonishingly weak energy fields with great precision. For example, the magnetic field of an electron can be measured to an accuracy of one ten billionth. It seems unreasonable, in the face of such great sensitivity, to suggest that for over a hundred years physicists have overlooked an entirely different type of energy that is so strong that it can be detected just by waving one’s hands through its field. It’s rather like saying that ornithologists, who have recorded extremely rare species of birds, have for over one hundred years, failed to ever notice a species as common as the robin.

If the claim made by Therapeutic Touch supporters is true, the discovery of a strong but previously unknown type of energy would be a major scientific breakthrough, worthy of a Nobel prize. Given the potential importance of such a discovery, both theoretically and practically, one would expect that the developers of Therapeutic Touch would have spared no expense in doing elegant experiments clearly demonstrating that this new energy really exists and outlining is characteristics. Such an expectation would meet great disappointment. Consistent with the pseudoscientific characteristic of not looking closely at the phenomenon in question, Therapeutic Touch proponents have never, done even a single experiment to try to conclusively show that this energy field exists, or what its characteristics are—nor have they ever done a single study aimed at determining whether practitioners could really detect the alleged energy field.

The concept of the human energy field actually predates the rise of Therapeutic Touch by many years. For more than a hundred years psychics and related mystics have claimed to be able to see the human aura and sense a human energy field. They seem to be dead on at detecting the presence of these phenomena when there is a human being directly in front of them. Since the aura is said to extend a few inches outward from the body, it ought to be possible to detect the presence or absence of a human hidden behind, but very close to the edge of, an object that blocks the actual person from view. Psychics, of course, have never bothered to test the reality of their claimed powers in this regard—they have simply asserted that they have this power. Loftin (1989–90) did perform a test on one psychic who claimed to be able to see auras. This person did not score above chance at detecting whether or not a person was actually hidden behind a partition.