Five Steps In The Therapeutic Touch Method

Therapeutic touch was founded by Dolores Krieger RN and Dora Kunz (natural healer), it emerged in the early in the 1970s. Therapeutic touch is a contemporary interpretation of several ancient healing practices and its purpose is to facilitate healing and relieve the patient from any pain they are having. Therapeutic Touch also has a great influence in religious faith healing. This healing technique does not involve any type of contact and it is a widely used nursing practice also considered a nursing intervention. There are 100,000 people around the world are trained in therapeutic touch and that includes 40,000 health care professionals. Therapeutic touch is also taught in more than 100 colleges in seventy-five countries. When therapeutic touch was founded it was a contact technique which then evolved into a no contact technique. Its main objective is to balance out the human

energy field to resolve any health problems and relieve pain. Is it possible for a human to sense another person’s energy field? And if it is can it be manipulated?
Just like every technique has its own process that must be completed before the treatment is finished, Therapeutic Touch also has its own intentional directed process during which practitioners heals or relieves a patient of pain .

There is a total of five steps in the Therapeutic Touch technique. The first step is called centering, which is meditation this is used to make sure that the patient is calm. The second step is assessment, which is where the practitioner moves their hands 2-4 inches over the patient to detect where the patient has an imbalance of energy. Third step is unruffling it’s also called intervention, which is when the practitioner is trying clear the energy flow so it can be symmetric. The forth step is balancing or rebalancing energy, this is when energy is being redirected to where it needs to be. The final step is called evaluation/closure, which is when the practitioner decides when they’re finished, but they usually repeat this process 2-3 times. Usually this process does not involve any type of contact unless the practitioner uses the old form of Therapeutic

Touch.
Therapeutic touch didn’t start off as a no contact technique. In the online articled named, Further Notes on Therapeutic Touch, the author Kevin Courcey, R.N., states that, “…the original protocol was based on actual physical touch [3], subsequent research claimed that similar results could be obtained without touching the patient [4].” This reveals that when the whole idea of Therapeutic Touch came around it was a contact technique which then evolved into a no contact technique. The human energy field is said to contain Chi and Prana. This is what allows the practitioner to tamper and feel the flow of the human’s energy field. According to the Skeptic’s Dictionary, Chi (Chinese) and Prana (Indian) have the same definition which is “the natural energy of the universe”, which is basically the life energy that interacts with the world. Practitioners that practice the new technique of Therapeutic Touch say that a human energy field is present outside our body. It is based on the belief that everything that is living on the planet had an energy field that produces an aura that surrounds the body making it possible to manipulate it. In Dolores Krieger’s book called Living the Therapeutic Touch: Healing as a Lifestyle, she states that “…telereceptors, a receptor of stimuli at a distance, as are most of the other senses of seeing, hearing, and smell. In these teleoreceptors the object impacts upon the senses, although the object itself is at a distance. So, too, does the touch involved in Therapeutic Touch.” This quote insight on why Krieger believed that Therapeutic Touch was a successful healing technique. Krieger conducted her own experiments that served as evidence for her idea of Therapeutic Touch as an effective healing practice until a 9 year old coordinated an experiment that served as credible evidence that the healing practice was not effective.
In 1998 the first experiment on Therapeutic Touch was published by Rosa et al. and it tested if therapeutic touch practitioners could sense a human energy field, 21 practitioners took part in this experiment. The experiment involved one practitioner (at a time) and an experimenter that were divided by a screen which had two holes cut at the bottom. The practitioner would then put their hands through the holes and have a towel placed above them so they would not see any type of shadows under the screen. Then the experimenter which was Rosa, flipped a coin to see what hand they would to put their hand over (about 4 inches), this process was repeated a couple of times with each practitioner. In the book Pseudoscience and the paranormal, the author Terence Hines claims that, “If practitioners can detect a human energy field, as they claim, then they should score well above the 50% chance figure in this situation. They did not. The overall score was 44% correct-below, but not significantly from- chance.”(Hines, 365). This claim is credible evidence that goes against the idea that a person can feel human energy field. After the experiment and its results were revealed to the public, the practitioners defended themselves and their reputations by trying to discredit Rosa’s experiment. Many practitioners were saying that they couldn’t sense her human energy field because she was not ill but Hines states that, “Oddly, nowhere in Therapeutic Touch literature had this fact never been mentioned—it was only trotted out as an excuse after Rosa et al. findings were published”. It show how fast practitioners were to point fingers instead of admitting that they couldn’t sense another person’s energy field and that their practices don’t really work. This experiment debunked Therapeutic touch and the practices that come with it so that’s why all the proponents tried to discredit it because it could decrease the belief in that healing practice as well as the patients that used that technique.
Therapeutic Touch not has no concrete evidence supporting their idea of no touch healing but they also reveal pitfalls and fallacies when their so called evidence is presented. Some pitfalls that were present when Therapeutic Touch was brought up were selection bias and confirmation bias. Selection bias and Confirmation bias could be seen in Therapeutic touch because the proponents over looked all the information that debunked their healing practice. The fallacies of logic that were present in this healing practice were ad hominem, fallacy of composition/ division, ad populum, and appeal to tradition. Ad Hominem is the attack on an arguer instead of the argument and this is present when Rosa conducts an experiment that goes against the abilities of Therapeutic Touch practitioners. The practitioners attacked Rosa’s credibility and the results of the test because of the negative results it produced. Fallacy of composition/ division can be seen in Therapeutic touch because a few of the results from certain experiments were positive got people to believe that it was an effective healing technique. Another fallacy that is present when discussing Therapeutic Touch was ad populum because it falsely assumes that if many people believe in it then it must be true. Appeal to tradition is also a fallacy that could be applied when talking about Therapeutic Touch because it has been around for so many years that people believe it is successful. Lastly the characteristics of pseudoscience that Therapeutic Touch has is the dogmatic refusal to give up an idea, small effects that remain small overtime, selective use of data, and the employment of the pitfalls of human perception and reasoning.
Based on the evidence provided on Therapeutic Touch, it seems to oppose the idea of it actually working, but it never actually states that it does not work at all. In Hines’s book he states “The most reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the extant literature on the effectiveness of therapeutic touch is that no one has even come close to showing that the technique is effective.” (Hines, 369). This demonstrates that people have yet to come up with concrete evidence that Therapeutic Touch actually exist. Additionally, in an online article titled Therapeutic touch: Healing therapy or Hoax?, it describes an award that would be given to anyone who could prove that they can feel human energy fields, then it states that, “Nobody has succeeded yet.” If people have the ability to do therapeutic touch then why hasn’t this award been claimed? This serves as evidence against the idea and effectiveness of Therapeutic Touch.