11-Year-Old Debunks Claims Of Touchiehealie Bullshitters
Gad Saad blogs at Psychology Today about 11-year-old Emily Rosa, who, in 1998, published a paper in JAMA debunking the bullshit altie med therapy called "therapeutic touch":
Practitioners of TT are supposedly capable of curing specific ailments (e.g., pain) via the transference (or manipulation) of human energy fields (?) from their hands to a patient's afflicted body part. Rosa's experiment consisted of having TT healers slip their hands through a partition that would not permit them to see the other side of the partition. She would then place her hand above either their right or left hands, and ask them to state the location of her hand. Twenty-one TT healers of differing levels of experience (one to twenty-seven years) took part in the study. Two hundred and eighty trials were conducted in total. The healers achieved a success rate of 44%, namely their performance was worse than what one might expect via random guessing!...Perhaps the most important takeaway from this story is the democratic nature of the scientific method. A young child was able to devise an experiment that allowed her to test a given claim. This is precisely why any belief system that does not permit for such objective scrutiny should be viewed with much suspicion if not derision.
Gad's smart and very interesting book: The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
Penn & Teller pointed this exact incident out in their 'New Age Medicine' episode of "Bullshit!"
A hilarious show which had a lot of truth to it.
DrCos at October 3, 2011 4:59 AM
There were several design problems with that study. The major one was that the hand the TTers were supposed to work on was not that of a sick person. Another problem is that the girl did not design the experiment, the mother did...
ParatrooperJJ at October 3, 2011 9:40 AM
The major one was that the hand the TTers were supposed to work on was not that of a sick person.
Not a design flaw since the TTers didn't detect that the hands at all, let along that they weren't that of a sick person. Do you really believe that it would have made a difference? (Besides everyone has something medically wrong with them, however minor.)
Another problem is that the girl did not design the experiment, the mother did...
That's a problem? Heaven forbid a parent actually teach a child. Moreover, from the reports I read, the child did come up with the idea. That a parent guided her is a very good thing, not a problem.
Joe at October 3, 2011 10:42 AM
"There were several design problems with that study. The major one was that the hand the TTers were supposed to work on was not that of a sick person."
So they can tell the difference between the energy field of a "sick" hand and the table. But a healthy hand has the same "energy reading" as the empty space above the table top. This is supposed to make me think that these people have an actual ability?
It's not like there was a tiny margin of error that we're picking on. The TT folks would have literally been better off by flipping a coin.
Elle at October 4, 2011 4:19 AM
Leave a comment