The story behind The Emperor’s New Clothes alleges that, last minute, author Hans Christian Andersen changed the ending from one in which all his subjects admired the naked monarch to the ending we know today. There’s some debate about what inspired the change to include a child in the crowd shouting that the emperor’s wangdoodle was hanging out. One theory is that it came from a story of Andersen’s own life in which his mother brought him to see the King of Denmark appearing before a crowd, and his response was “he’s nothing more than a human being.”
If you think it’s just a fairy tale that it can take a child to see through an institution’s worth of adult bullshit, we should talk about the youngest person to have their research published.
Today’s Moment of Science… Emily Rosa and Therapeutic Touch.
There are measurable benefits from human touch. It can relax you, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and reduce anxiety. Along with helping alleviate pain, therapeutic massage has been shown to reduce cortisol along with increasing serotonin and dopamine. There’s a small but interesting study in which markers of participants’ anxiety and depression were reduced when they gave regular massages.
Remember that next time your partner is stressed out and you could use a back rub. It’s totes for them. Uh-huh.
Howthefuckever.
‘Benefits’ are different from ‘cures.’ From conflating the two, there exists a long history of mystics, religious folks, and actual trained medical douchecanoes claiming you can be healed from serious medical issues with simple human touch. That laying of hands fuckery I grew up with doesn’t heal shit. Unless they’re touching you with acyclovir ointment, because that stuff is suppressive therapy that works. So I hear.
Howthemotherfuckever.
Then there’s poorly named Therapeutic Touch (TT), in which patients aren’t touched at all. Rather, a trained medical professional will hover their hands over the area of the body that needs healing and that… helps? Somehow? With energy or shit?
Developed in the 1970s by nurse Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz, the head of a fringe religious organization, it was rooted in the tradition of touch healing therapies while not being tacitly religious. It was alleged that the therapy didn’t heal, but it helped with “energy support” so that the patient could heal themselves. A testament to the amount of cocaine and lead paint kicking around at the time, this shit soared in popularity in the 1980s.
Until nine year old Emily Rosa was like “but really?”
Because as much as some patients liked TT, treatment was based on something they had to take the practitioner’s word for: their ability to sense a patient’s human energy field (HEF). When Rosa saw a video about TT with nurses describing the HEF as “warm” and “tactile as taffy,” she went all ‘interesting idea, be a shame if a fourth grade science fair project were to test that.’
Skeptics like James Randi had tried to test practitioners in a similar way to Rosa. Since he was this famous magician and debunker, they nope’d on out. They weren’t so wary of adorable, brilliant little Emily.
Twenty-one TT practitioners participated. Rosa sat on one side of a table opposite the participants who extended their arms towards her through an opaque screen. She would randomly hover her hand over one of theirs, and ask them to identify where her hand- and energy- was. They each had ten chances.
These people were treating patients and they could “detect” Emily Rosa’s energy field a whopping 4.4 out of ten times on average. In 1998, Rosa’s study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and she’s still the youngest person to have research published. The study didn’t exactly toll the death knell of therapeutic touch because studies come and go but bullshit is forever. It’s still taught and used in major hospital systems, the emperor roaming the halls naked as a jaybird.
This has been your Moment of Science, with a small heads up that your friend the reiki practitioner would also fail this test. Hard.
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I’m quite the firm believer in the laying of hands, although we referred to it as applying direct pressure to control hemorrhage, while one fumbles with one hand to get the components of a proper pressure dressing on places where a tourniquet wouldn’t quite do.
I’ve also ran my hands over a patient, feeling for deformities, bleeding, etc.
Once given basic stabilizing treatment, they get transported to proper definitive treatment, as I have the skills of a sturgeon, not a surgeon. Yeah, I’ll hang out on the bottom of the pool for extended periods.. 😉
As for anyone trying reiki on me as a treatment, they’ll be enjoying traction once I can find my feet…