A No-Touch Therapy

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Keeping her hands a few inches away from her seated patient, nurse Janet Quinn moves them around his body from head to toe, as if she were brushing away cobwebs. At the end of each sweeping motion, her eyes closed, she makes a dismissive gesture, as if shaking water off from her fingertips.

Quinn is giving "therapeutic touch" (TT), a controversial form of therapy that is spreading through the ranks of nursing and already claims tens of thousands of practitioners in the U.S. and many foreign countries. According to its proponents, TT not only comforts and relaxes patients, but also relieves pain, produces chemical changes in the blood and promotes healing.

Or maybe, as its detractors contend, TT is a form of New Age mumbo jumbo, a no-touch laying on of hands that has no legitimate place in medicine. Leading the attack is Rocky Mountain Skeptics, a group of scientists and other professionals based in Boulder, Colorado, who investigate what they call "pseudo science." Its president, computer specialist Bela Scheiber, charges that TT is "paranormal and religious activity masquerading as science."

Practitioners of TT claim that their hand motions actually smooth kinks or "congestion" in the "energy field" that surrounds every human being. And that, they say, is what makes the treatment work. As proof of TT's efficacy, they cite "scientific" reports in such obscure journals as Subtle Energies and Psychoenergetic Systems, as well as stories in popular magazines.

Vern Bullough, a retired professor of nursing at the State University of New York, scoffs at these claims. "None of the research demonstrated that there's any effect," he says, "and many of the conclusions are subjective." He also notes that no evidence exists for a human energy field. Still TT seems to have gone mainstream. It is taught in nursing schools, practiced in hospitals and described matter-of-factly, without reservation, in Techniques in Clinical Nursing, a widely distributed textbook.

In Toronto, where TT is practiced routinely in several hospitals, anyone seeking information about the technique can dial 65-TOUCH to reach the local TT network, which has 600 members in Ontario. At Denver's Presbyterian -- St. Luke's Hospital, where nurses routinely practice TT, the staff has created a "Department of Energy." And at Bristol Hospital in Connecticut, a quarter of the caregivers have completed an in-house, 15-hour course in TT.

Why do nurses take so readily to therapeutic touch? One reason, suggests Carla Selby, of the Rocky Mountain group, is that it's a form of empowerment for women who generally feel that they are second-class citizens in the medical profession -- unappreciated and directed by (mostly male) doctors to perform largely scut work. Being allowed to practice TT in hospitals, she says, makes them feel more involved in the healing process. "I'm a feminist," Selby says, "and I'm all for nurses getting out from under the thumbs of doctors. But this is exactly the wrong thing to do."

But what's the harm? ask TT devotees, who seem bewildered by the flap. Kathy Butler, a Melbourne geneticist concerned about TT inroads into Australia, has one answer. "Health funding is in crisis," she says. "Surely valuable nursing hours are better used with scientifically proven, genuinely useful nursing methods."