The article that showed that therapeutic touch "practitioners" were unable
to detect "energy fields" was in JAMA:
Rosa L et al. A close look at therapeutic touch. JAMA 1998; 279: 1005-1010.
I wonder if it has any effect on the prevalence of teaching therapeutic touch
in nursing schools?
Last year there were some articles in Academic Medicine about alternative
medicine:
Tonelli and Callahan argued that alternative medicine should not be subject to
rigorous scientific evaluation, but requires "alternative epistemic methods"
Tonelli MR< Callahan TC. Why alternative medicine cannot be evidence-based.
Acad Med 2001; 76: 1213-1220.
Ripostes to this were:
Bloom BS. What is this nonsense that complementary and alternative medicine is
not amenable to controlled investigation of population effects. Acad Med 2001;
76: 1221-1223.
Sampson W. Dancing with a dream: the folly of pursuing alternative medicine.
Acad Med 2001; 76: 301-303.
And Beyerstein wrote a very nice piece about social, cultural, and
psychological (including cognitive psychological) reasons that people fall
for alternative medicine:
Beyerstein BL. Alternative medicine and common errors of reasoning. Acad
Med 2001; 76: 230-237.
Nonetheless, alternative medicine marches on, feeding in part on
the postmodernist mumbo jumbo that is all too powerful in academic, and
creeping into medicine. For example, in the opening article of an Ann Int
Med series on alternative medicine, Kaptchuk and Eisenberg argued:
the "old cultural war of a dominant culture versus heretical
rebellion in politics and religion as well as medicine has
begun to transform into a recognition of postmodern multiple narratives."
Kaptchuk TJ, Eisenberg DM. Varieties of healing. 1: medical pluralism
in the United States. Ann Intern Med 2001; 135: 189-195.
And for the most glaring example of the penetration of pseudo-science
masquerading as alternative medicine into US academic health care,
West Virginia University now has the Sydney Banks Institute, dedicated to
the teachings of a self-proclaimed "theosophist." (Madame Blavatsky, of
table levitating fame in the late 19th century, was another well known
theosophist.) So now we have seance based medicine.
http://www.hsc.wvu.edu/sbi/sbi/abt2.htm
---------------------------------------------------------
Roy M. Poses MD
Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention
Memorial Hospital of RI
111 Brewster St.
Pawtucket, RI 02860
USA
401 729-2383
fax: 401 729-2494
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I forget which journal it was in - ?NEJM ?JAMA but there was an RCT carried
out as a school project that undermined the credibility of therapeutic
touch - it showed that practitioners of therapeutic touch cou;dn't tell if
there was a hand beneath their own or not when visually shielded.
Lesley Kay
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