April 1

The Right Touch: Eleven-year-old Stuns Medical Community

On this day in 1998, eleven-year-old Emily Rosa became famous for her study challenging therapeutic touch. Rosa published her findings in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. The theory of therapeutic touch states that humans give off an energy field 4 to 10 centimeters from their bodies, which can be sensed and used to help healing. In Rosa's study, trained therapeutic-touch practitioners sat behind a screen and placed their hands through holes in the screen. Rosa placed her hand near one of the practitioner's hands and asked the person being tested to sense which hand she was near. She found that the practitioners were right less than half of the time-an accuracy rate about the same as guessing