Twenty Years After the “Emily Event,” Energy Therapies Live on Through Bad Science

BY APRIL BLESKE-RECHEK, KATIE PAULICH, AND KEITH JORGENSEN

IN 1998, 11-YEAR OLD EMILY ROSA CAUSED A NATIONAL sensation when she published the results of her 4th grade science experiment in the Journal of the American Medical Association.1 She had generated a simple but clever experiment to test the claim that the socalled “human energy field”2 (HEF: “aura”) can be detected, and she had compiled convincing evidence that individuals—specifically, Therapeutic Touch (TT) practitioners who claim to manipulate others’ energy fields for healing purposes—could not reliably detect that energy field. (You can watch Emily test her subjects in this special on her experiment featured on ABC’s 20/20 with John Stossel: https://bit.ly/1ouAKQJ). As summarized by Larry Sarner, who recounted the events for Skeptic magazine in 1998, energy therapies are based on the fundamental claim that “the hands can be used to manifest a TT practitioner’s intention to heal by detecting and eliminating differences in the HEF of a patient, thereby either returning the patient directly to health or removing impediments to the healing processes of the patient’s own body.”3 Because Emily Rosa showed that self-proclaimed Therapeutic Touch practitioners could not reliably detect a human energy field, her results led to the direct conclusion that claims about Therapeutic Touch practitioners’ ability to modify human energy fields to promote healing were questionable at best and, more likely, completely mistaken.

In fact, no one has yet demonstrated the existence or reliable detection of a human energy field.

When Sarner wrote about the Emily Event in 1998, he expressed hope that TT would fade out of nursing schools’ curricula and that research on TT would be “relegated to the ‘research’ back rooms of nursing academia.” 3 In this essay, we consider whether those hopes have been realized. Do nursing schools continue to offer courses on energy (biofield) therapy, including TT and its sister therapy, Healing Touch (HT)? Do practitioners and scholars continue to make claims about the healing powers of energy therapy, and on what standards of evidence do they rely? The data we have to offer regarding these questions is not promising. In fact, energy therapies appear to be thriving.

The Spark

Our interest in energy therapy began several years ago, when one of us (let’s call her “The Skeptic”) was asked to provide research design consultation for a colleague (we’ll call her “The Believer”) from the School of Nursing. The nursing scholar was preparing a grant proposal for her research on cancer patients.

She felt that undergoing an MRI is uncomfortable and inappropriate for cancer patients, and she wanted to test the hypothesis that undergoing an MRI disrupts cancer patients’ energy balance. The Skeptic was perplexed. Putting aside her curiosity about the various (presumably legitimate) medical reasons for undergoing an MRI as a cancer patient, she focused on the concept of energy balance, which she had not encountered previously. The conversation went something like this: The Skeptic: How is “energy” measured? The Believer: By trained Therapeutic Touch practitioners. (She hovered her hands a couple of inches away from the Skeptic’s scalp in demonstration.) They know a disrupted energy field when they feel it.

The Skeptic: What does a disrupted energy field feel like? The Believer: Well, some energy fields are calm and smooth, and some can be cold and sticky, and some can feel hot and electric—just like when you rub an inflated balloon against your head and set your hair afloat.

The Skeptic was perplexed. She considered the nursing scholar’s plan to show that energy fields are disrupted by undergoing an MRI. She made a suggestion:

The Skeptic: It would be useful to include a measurement of each patient’s energy field both before and after the MRI, and perhaps you could have two practitioners—who don’t know whether the patient is heading into the MRI or coming out of the MRI—make independent evaluations of the patient’s energy field. That way, you would be able to check on inter-rater agreement under researcher-blind conditions.

The Believer balked. She had multiple TT practitioners at hand, but the proposed method would require a lot of time and effort from those practitioners. The Skeptic: Well, what agency are you submitting this to? Would there be enough money to offer payment for practitioners’ time and effort? The Believer: (Unidentified) Foundation. They have funded my TT studies in the past. The Skeptic was not consulted again on that project, and she wasn’t surprised. The research was likely to be funded no matter how poorly designed.

The seeds were planted, however. Over the next few years, our lab learned bits and pieces about the history of energy therapy at our university’s School of Nursing. We learned that The Skeptic’s sister, who went through our university’s School of Nursing back in the 1990s, had been taught TT and had had a good laugh with one of her nursing buddies as they pretended to “do” TT to each other. We also learned that multiple members of the nursing faculty have been (and continue to be) quite committed to it. Indeed, the School of Nursing includes instruction on energy therapy as part of their required second year coursework, and in 2018, our university’s Honors Program approved a course called, “The Nurturing Energy Therapy for Healthcare Professionals” as a standard offering. On two separate occasions when we asked high-level members of our nursing faculty what they thought about energy therapy, we were met with enthusiastic claims that the procedure had “worked” for them and their loved ones.

Energy Therapies are Thriving

Sadly, our university is not unique. In 1998, TT was taught at more than 100 colleges and universities worldwide,1 and the available evidence suggests that energy therapy coursework and certification programs are now widely available both face-to-face and online. A few minutes on the internet reveal that energy therapy programs are alive and well in universities across the U.S., from large public universities (such as the University of Central Florida) to community colleges (such as Normandale Community College in Minnesota) to private graduate schools that specialize in alternative medicine (such as Maryland University of Integrative Health). Online training options are numerous. Therapeutic Touch International (therapeutictouch. org) provides links to certification programs and a directory of hundreds of “Qualified Practitioners.” 4 A leading Healing Touch website, healingtouchprogram.com, details opportunities (if you pay) for six levels of coursework, practitioner certification, and instructor certification; it also provides an online directory of nearly 1700 practitioners. In just one year (2017), a single Healing Touch Certification Program based in San Antonio certified 43 new practitioners and six new instructors, and renewed certifications on an additional 156 practitioners and 20 instructors.5 Although some experts characterize energy therapy as nonsense6 or quackery,7 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services categorizes energy therapy under the umbrella of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Knowledge and use of CAM in general has increased over the past 20 years since Rosa’s 1998 publication.8 As of 2010, 42% of hospitals offered some form of alternative therapies to their patients, and between 2002 and 2012 a steady rate of 1 in 200 adults reported use of energy therapy (for comparison, about 1 in 100 have used acupuncture).