A No-Touch Therapy

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In the U.S. too, federal medical funding is getting tighter, but not for therapeutic touch. Over the past decade, the nih has awarded at least $150,000 in grants for TT research; and the Department of Defense, through Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, has just awarded a University of Alabama researcher the largest TT grant yet: $355,000 to study the effects of the practice on burn patients. "What next for the dod?" asks Scheiber. "Faith healing?"

Despite the growing skepticism, TT practitioners show no reticence in discussing their work. "It's not something we do under the table," says Dolores Kreiger, who invented the technique in the 1970s as a professor at the New York University nursing school and claims to have taught it since then to some 45,000 health professionals. "There is validity to therapeutic touch," she insists. "Otherwise we would have been burned as witches long ago."

Yet the steps for administering TT to a patient seem akin to witchcraft. As described by nurse Quinn, a leading advocate of the technique, they include "centering" within one's head, assessing which areas of the energy field feel "out of balance" with the rest of the field, clearing and mobilizing the energy field, and finally, "directing" energy to facilitate healing. Quinn admits, though, that "we don't have empirical data to demonstrate the existence of a personal energy field. It's a working hypothesis. In science, you're allowed to do that."

Mystical talk of energy fields spurred the Rocky Mountain Skeptics to organize protests against the University of Colorado Center for Human Caring (C.H.C.), which appears to be a hotbed of the TT movement. There therapeutic touch is thriving despite appeals by the skeptics to the university, the state board of nursing and even the Colorado legislature to justify teaching the bizarre technique. A university committee, while acknowledging "methodological flaws" in TT, recommended retaining it in the curriculum, largely on the grounds of "academic freedom."

Critics of TT concede that it can alleviate tension and anxiety. But Selby asks, "Why doesn't the nurse just come in and sit on the side of the patient's bed and talk, perhaps hold his hand? It would have the same effect." And in a column in the Toronto Star, Henry Gordon, a local skeptic, likened that relief to the placebo effect, which, he wrote, "makes TT no different from the laying on of hands." Dr. William Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, in Loma Linda, California, agrees: "I see therapeutic touch as a form of faith healing that has captured the imagination of a few nurses who happen to be in pretty powerful positions of influence within the nursing profession."

Jarvis may have been referring to Jean Watson, who heads Colorado's C.H.C. and accepts TT, and to Quinn, an associate professor at the university's health sciences center. Quinn teaches TT courses, lectures widely and has also produced a $675 video called Therapeutic Touch: Healing Through Human Energy Fields, which the Manhattan-based National League for Nursing is promoting.

The league, a major accreditor of nursing schools, will probably continue to lend its considerable clout to TT; its president-elect for 1995 is none other than Jean Watson.