[4] One highly cited study, designed by the then-nine-year-old Emily Rosa and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, found that practitioners of therapeutic touch could not detect the presence or absence of a hand placed a few inches above theirs when their vision was obstructed.
"[10] A 2004 Cochrane review found no good evidence that it helped with wound healing, but the authors withdrew it in 2016 "due to serious concerns over the validity of included studies".
[11] Dora Kunz, a theosophy promoter and one-time president (1975–1987) of the Theosophical Society in America, and Dolores Krieger, now Professor Emerita of Nursing Science, New York University,[12] developed therapeutic touch in the 1970s.
[17] Justification for TT has been sought in two fields: Martha E. Rogers' contemporal "Science of Unitary Human Beings", and quantum mechanics, in particular Fritjof Capra's mystical interpretation of the latter.
[18] The supposed healing in TT takes place via a discredited physical process called "electron transfer resonance", which physicist Alan Sokal describes as "nonsense".
[2] Over the decades, many clinical studies have been performed to investigate TT's efficacy, as well as various meta-analyses and at least one systematic review, yielding varying results and conclusions.
With the help of Stephen Barrett from Quackwatch and the assistance of her mother, Linda Rosa and her step-father Larry Sarner, Emily became the youngest researcher to have a paper accepted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which debunked the claim of therapeutic touch practitioners can reliably sense a "Human Energy Field."
[6][7][13][19] JAMA editor George D. Lundberg, M.D, recommended that third-party payers and the public should question paying for this procedure "until or unless additional honest experimentation demonstrates an actual effect.
Sokal, in 2006, reported generally accepted estimates of over 80 colleges and universities spread over 70 countries where therapeutic touch is taught as well as some 80 hospitals in North America where it is practiced.